Fallen
by GadFlyGirl
Summary: [Work in progress] They're overworked, unsung, and constantly in demand: meet the healers, surgeons, and hospital administrators of Minas Tirith the Ring War from the perspective of one very ordinary Gondorian nurse.
1. Original Prologue

**A/N:** This is the original prologue for "Fallen;" the revised version is in the following chapter. I made certain changes to the prologue once I was well into the writing of this story and had realized that the focus and plot had shifted from that of the story that I had originally set out to write. The prologue will likely go through at least one more revision, but for now the two different versions are temporarily posted side-by-side for comparison's sake.

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My daughter turns and looks at me in her white gown, so delicate and lovely that for a moment I can scarcely believe she is mine. Her smile is expectant and shy.

"A good fit, is it?" I say, a smile playing at the corners of my own mouth. She is the future, wrapped in a relic. "Your grandmother would be so pleased, to see you in her dress. Looking so beautiful."

The late afternoon light falls in squares on the floor as I cross the room to her, reminding me of the board for the game she and my eldest son are so fond of playing. They taught me how to play chess, once, but I never took to it. It seemed far too clean, all the captures and the deaths, the transformations and shifts of power.

She turns down her eyes and laughs, carefully adjusting the pearl-colored folds of the garment. In a few days she will marry a sweet, clever young man who works as a scrivener in the White City's hall of records; his hands are soft, and perpetually blotched with ink.

"Did you not wear this dress, Mother? For your wedding?" She looks up at me again, blue eyes large and inquisitive—her father's eyes.

I shake my head. The clouds must be shifting quickly today, for already the light has changed and the game board is gone. "There was no time, when I got married. We had to make due with what we had. This dress was locked away in a box in our house, which suffered little during the Siege, thank goodness. Your grandmother was… disappointed to learn she had missed it all, when she returned, but more than anything she was glad to see me alive, and I her." I reach out to stroke my daughter's dark hair, lightly, with the back of my hand. "But now this dress is yours, and your own daughter's, some day."

She smiles again. This is the story she thinks she knows, the story of a fierce, whirlwind love that bloomed even as our City crumbled around us. How romantic it is, love in war. These children—my daughter, her fiancé—have never known anything but peace, and I am glad of it. I want them to grow old quietly together, smoothing their fingers over their tidy black queens and white pawns.

We talk about her wedding arrangements for a few minutes more, and then she is gone, with a kiss for me and a rustle of clean fabric. I stand at the window, closing my eyes against the honey-colored light so that its afterimage floats on the insides of my lids. _There was no time, when I got married._ In truth, the story my daughter thinks she knows is both plainer and darker than the feverish, battle-edged love she imagines. I watch the light, remembering when they brought the dying boy to us.


	2. Revised Prologue

My daughter turns and looks at me in her white gown, so delicate and lovely that for a moment I can scarcely believe she is mine. Her smile is expectant and shy.

"A good fit, is it?" I say, a smile playing at the corners of my own mouth. She is the future, wrapped in a relic. "Your grandmother would be so pleased, to see you in her dress. Looking so beautiful."

The late afternoon light falls in squares on the floor as I cross the room to her, reminding me of the board for the game she and my eldest son are so fond of playing. They taught me how to play chess, once, but I never took to it. It seemed much too clean, all the captures and the deaths, the transformations and shifts of power.

She turns down her eyes and laughs, carefully adjusting the pearl-colored folds of the garment. In a few days she will marry a sweet, clever young man who works as a scrivener in the White City's hall of records; his hands are soft, and perpetually blotched with ink.

"Did you also wear this dress, Mother? At your own wedding?" She looks at me again, her blue eyes large and inquisitive—her father's eyes.

I nod. The clouds must be shifting quickly today, for already the light has changed and the game board is gone. I realize at this moment that neither the sight of this gown, nor the scent of the lovingly-preserved cloth, nor the soft whisper of the hem brushing the floor, stirs to life such vivid memories as it ought to. "Yes," I say, and reach out to stroke my daughter's dark hair, lightly, with the back of my hand. "And now this dress is yours, and your own daughter's, some day."

She smiles again; she will wear it, and walk with flowers in her hands. The most important day in a woman's life, or so they say.

The reason that I do not remember my own wedding particularly well is that its recollection is overshadowed in my mind by that which preceded it. There are things I can recall with perfect clarity: a row of beds, each with a small flag of black cloth knotted to one post; the cool, slender edge of a knife; the mingled smells of blood and smoke, of ash and poppy and chamomile. In the end, I did not truly require a marriage ceremony in order to change my life, or transform me, or make me swear love and honor and allegiance. Nor did my husband. There had already been the War. These children—my daughter, her fiancé—have never known anything but peace, and I am glad of it. I want them to grow old quietly together, smoothing their fingers over their tidy black queens and white pawns.

We talk about her wedding arrangements for a few minutes more, and then she is gone, with a kiss for me and a rustle of clean fabric. I stand at the window, closing my eyes against the thick, honey-colored light so that its afterimage floats on the insides of my lids. I take in the silence and remember the day they brought the dying boy to us.


	3. Greater Need

_Turning and turning in the widening gyre  
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;   
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;  
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,  
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere  
The ceremony of innocence is drowned…_  
W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming"

_Don't let it bring you down  
It's only castles burning…_  
Neil Young, "Don't Let it Bring You Down"

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There were, in truth, a great many dying boys brought to us in those lightless hours. Perhaps I should not speak of them as "boys", for many had more than twice my years, but even the most tired and haggard among them looked, in some strange way, fragile and new as the life yet drained from their bodies. By March of that year, the City itself seemed a brittle shell of what it had once been, emptied now of all but the soldiers and guards, the statesmen and healers. I was one of precious few women in a vast martial camp of men and boys, a suddenly alien terrain that only played at being a real place. I came to dread those rare occasions in which I had need to leave the Houses and venture out onto the streets. I feared no assailants from the outside, not in those early days, but the vacant avenues and darkened windows of unpeopled shops and dwellings prompted me into a skittish, stumbling run on more than one errand, so eager was I to be out of their hollow-eyed sights.

In times of peace the Houses are reserved for the gravely ill, and they are light and airy and quiet. As a much younger girl, just learning my craft, I would keep watch at bedsides or go on tasks for my mother; on some silent afternoons I would come sharply into an awareness of myself, learning when I should shift and when I should keep still. I listened to my own breath and could feel the exact weight of my limbs, the way the skin stretched over my bones, there beside those whose own bodies were slowly failing.

But I was a grown-up young lady now, and all our land was being bled, and Gondor's strength was ebbing away. Situated as we were in the sixth circle, we healers were nestled in among countless councilors and clerks and the comings and goings of messengers, so news of the war should have come swiftly to us. As it were, we were rather isolated within our own wards and gardens. I learned little of the movements of companies and hosts, but knew what was coming, by way of the orders given to us. We took up our own defenses. We brought in what extra beds and pallets we could, laying them down so that their square edges touched, marching in columns down the lengths of the long halls. We stockpiled every scrap of clean cloth we found; in our storerooms we massed every herb known to our craft, and also some known only to our lore. All this we did as the light was leached from the sky, until one day seemed to emerge darker than the night which had preceded it.

I sat with Fíriel as we cut and folded countless yards of linen, watching as our finished work grew in soft piles at our feet.

"We could bind the wounds of several armies, now," she remarked, surveying the floor.

"Yes," I snorted. "Perhaps our good Warden wishes that we should tend to the legions of the East, as well as our own?"

She rested her knife-hand in her lap for a moment, eyebrows arched. "The Warden? Nay, thus far all our supply orders have come directly from the lord Aradîr." She shook her dark head in a manner that put me in mind of the way white-haired goodwives did when trying to ward off bad luck. "Neither healer nor surgeon," she added quietly.

This utterance was a long-standing refrain amongst those who worked in the Houses of Healing. Tradition held that while the Warden oversaw the staff and patients, it was the Master of the Houses, a statesman, who represented the Houses' interests in the City-councils. The Master was the one to whom the Warden must answer, and it was the Master who made the final decisions on many matters of supply, salary and the like. A good Master, my mother had told me, took care to listen to the Warden, and closely followed his counsel when making choices. A poor one, however, did not take the time to well acquaint himself with the workings of the Houses, and looked upon surgery and leech-craft as any other common trades, as they were in less enlightened nations. And the worst Masters were pure statesmen to the marrow, using the post only as a way to curry favor with their liege-lords, eager to ascend to higher appointments—neither healers nor surgeons, indeed.

In my lifetime, however, we had not had any Masters such as this, for it was said that the Lord Steward was a shrewd man who did not suffer opportunists kindly. The saying was mainly used to express mild annoyance or amusement at misunderstandings between men of the council and men of the scalpel. Lord Aradîr had been appointed Master some six months hence, when his predecessor had grown too feeble of eyesight and frail of hand to keep up with his required duties. I had never had any call to speak to Aradîr personally, of course, but he seemed a pleasant enough man, and as far I knew, he had yet to do any great wrong by us. Still, I found myself nodding in assent with Fíriel's statement, as I hoped his generous estimate would prove unnecessary.

I took another piece of fabric from the pile. "Do you think we'll really need all these dressings?" I asked, trying to sound as if I were inquiring about that evening's supper, though my voice rose slightly as I went on. "And will all those beds be filled, Fíriel?"

The other woman looked at me with large grey eyes. Of all the women in the Houses, Fíriel was somehow at once the gentlest and the most blunt. She was slender and fair, at least ten years my senior. She crouched at bedsides, patient as a cat, and occasionally told us lewd jokes when there were no men in earshot. Now she sighed and looked weary as she ran her fingers over the cloth.

"In truth? I cannot say one way or the other. 'Tis better to fill up the waiting hours, at any rate, though we may have fewer than we like, in the end."

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From then on it seemed no long wait until the large groups of the wounded began arriving. Soon I could scarcely recognize our familiar Houses. The light streaming in from the windows was greyed and muted. The air was close, and swiftly became thick and tortured with the groans and pleas of injured men. Every bed was full, and the steely odor of blood lingered on, no matter how we tried to scrub it away. Practiced though I was, I was one of the younger women in the place, and had little experience with battle injuries. Though I carried knives in my kit, I had seldom had chance to use them. When I saw the first men brought in and laid out, ashen and soaked with red, I went round the corner into a little alcove off the main room, and sank to the floor with my head against my knees, hoping in my shame that no one would see me. Beads of sweat dotted the back of my neck; flecks of shattered bone danced against the darkness when I pressed my eyes shut.

"Come." I opened my eyes to the clear, low voice and saw Fíriel standing above me, her slender hand extended towards mine. There was no judgment on her face. "We are all needed now." For a moment, I fixed my gaze blankly on the hem of her plain blue dress and pale smock, a mirror of my own garb, save for the new pink spots on her garments. Then I took her hand and she helped me up in one taut, strong motion, and led me back to our patients so that I might bloody my own fingers in earnest.

Fíriel was a fine teacher, and so was necessity. I soon learned not to flinch when I probed a wound to see how deep the damage went. I stopped flinching, as well, when I had to push out an arrowhead, or clamp shut the source of the worst bleeding until the surgeons could come. I fetched water, cleaned and dressed injuries, and gave what words I could to comfort the men, although it seemed at times that anything I said would be deflected by the hard, flinty terror in their eyes. Still, we saved more of those earlier ones than we lost, which was no small comfort. All of the workers in the Houses had fallen into our own weary, uneasy rhythm by nightfall, our voices strained and hushed and our hands red and aching. Even as they stumbled and gasped and bled, the men brought news from the shattered outer defenses, tidings we both yearned for and dreaded. There were rumors of warriors from the South, tall and fell, and armies that swarmed like insects, and a Black Captain before whom horses went mad, and valiant men bent and quailed in horror.

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"It's a miracle that this one made it to us at all," Fíriel murmured in my ear as we stood over one of our newest arrivals, a soldier brought in on one of the wains that had borne the survivors of the wreck of the Causeway Forts through the City Gates that morning. Word had come that day, passing from station to station: Lord Faramir could not hold the Pelennor, and now the river was overrun. It was only a matter of time. Men and women alike, we in the Houses lowered our voices and tightened our fingers round our instruments, biting back our fear.

This young man's lack of color contrasted starkly with his dark, mangled livery and damp brown hair—his face was nearly the same shade as the bandage I had carefully applied to his throat, though a spot of bright scarlet bloomed swiftly upon it. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, and he was terribly cold to the touch. His breathing was a shallow, pained rasp. Wounds to the neck like this one were almost sure to kill quickly. "He may live through the night, at best," Fíriel added. "Ioreth wants me," she sighed, drawing a blanket up over the boy, "and when I find her it shall be no less than a quarter-hour 'til I discover what she actually wants. Until then I am sure I will hear all about her cousin from Lossarnach."

"No doubt," I smiled wanly. "I'll see to him." I drew a black scrap of cloth from a pocket of my smock and tied it to the bedpost; in the Houses, this was the marker we gave to those we deemed beyond help, so that none of us need waste our time. I was running out, I noticed; I would have to go and find more, soon.

"Thank you." Fíriel patted my arm lightly and walked down the narrow corridor that passed between the rows of beds. We had all learned to live in tight spaces in the past few days, and even many of the women and girls had begun to resemble soldiers on watch, passing one another with the briefest of nods as we moved through the aisles.

I turned my eyes back to the boy. Above the bandage was a round face that reminded me somewhat of my youngest cousin's countenance. Merely a week ago I would have wept right there, in grief and revulsion, but now I had taught myself to float over it, my mind as clear and clean as the surgeon's knife before the first incision. I could look with something nearing indifference, everything clamped back neatly into a vague, manageable sense of dread. I wondered who had dealt this soldier his death blow, be it a Southron, or an orc, or some fouler creature of which we yet had no inkling… _For the Pelennor is overrun, and now only time stands between the Dark Tower and the White City…_

"Tar'!" A voice called out somewhere behind me, and then a young man in the same dark garb the dying boy wore was at my side, kneeling beside the bed. "Tarondor," he whispered, seeing the full extent of the damage. "_Valar_, no…" He turned to me, and I saw that he had a bright red streak across his forehead, over his weary blue eyes. Another gash was apparent on his left shoulder; not a clean one, either, as whatever blade had given it had torn raggedly through the cloth. Still, he had fared better than most of his comrades-in-arms. "Is… is there any chance for him?" he asked quietly, although from his subdued tone it was clear that he had the answer already. "Any at all?"

"Very little, I'm afraid." He swallowed and nodded. "He may live through the night," I added, allowing him to take in the information for a few moments before I went on. "Now, let us see what we might do for you, shall we?" I suggested softly. The soldier nodded again, resignedly, and pulled himself slowly up to sit on the edge of the narrow cot, very careful not to disturb his friend as he did so. He had the air of one who felt he ought to rend his clothes and daub his face with ashes, but was strangely grateful that the deed had already been done for him. Normally I would have asked him to follow me to the north ward, where we treated those wounds which threatened neither life nor limb. _But why not?_ I thought, excusing myself to replenish my supply of water and dressings. _Let him stay here. I will be ready if a case more needful than his should present itself._

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"We were boys together," the soldier explained as I tended him, and his voice had a hoarse edge to it. I nodded.

"I have not the time to give you stitches for this," I said as I cleaned the cut on his forehead. "You may have a scar, but 'tis not too deep." My mother had taught me very early on that I should always explain to my patients what I was doing. These days, I found myself able to follow this advice only intermittently.

"Should I live long enough for the skin to grow over," he murmured.

"We're thankful to all of you."

He was silent for several minutes more, and when he spoke again I saw that he wore the calm, glazed expression I had grown familiar with over the past few days. I had seen it on too many faces to count.

"Perhaps one day," he said slowly, "there shall be wars where no one needs to touch anyone else." He was smiling now, a thin ghost of a smile. "You would not have to touch a man to kill him, nor be close to him." He shut his eyes. "Perhaps you would not even have to look at him."

I finished with his forehead and moved on to his arm. He opened his eyes again. They were the color of the sky, the last time the sun had risen.

"You see, it would all be so much easier that way. No skin," he said, his voice catching slightly on the edge of the word, "and no blood."

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There were a small number of rooms set aside, so that the healers might get some rest. We took turns sleeping, a few hours at a time. I bypassed the basin of thyme-and-lavender water we used for hand-washing, instead scrubbing my hands until they chafed from the ash and lye of the hard brown soap that we kept. The women's quarters were dark. There were only five pallets in the close space, all of them occupied. I shrugged lightly to myself before stripping down to my shift, folding my dress and smock into a corner of the room, and sliding onto a mattress beside Fíriel. The older woman was already asleep, and as I curled my own body next to hers I could feel her warm, regular breath on my skin. She smelled faintly of chamomile, and I recalled she kept a private supply of the stuff in a pouch at her waist. The scent reminded me instantly of my mother—her hand resting on my cheek as she and my young brothers and cousins bade me farewell—she would have stayed here, my mother, had she not the children to look after…

_Your City has greater need of you now, dear one. Go, and be brave, and I will see you again soon…_

That night I dreamt of chamomile, and black wings scraping over a sky bluer than any I had yet seen in my waking life.


	4. Rations

_Her head to the west at evening when the dew is creeping,  
A shudder of gladness runs in her bones and torsal fiber  
She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in._  
Carl Sandburg, "Poppies"

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Whenever I chance upon the accounts that scholars and scribes have made to tell of our Great War, I read them with fascination and detachment both. It is like reading about events in a distant land, and try as I might, I can never entirely reconcile these tales with my memories. Once I even attempted to set down a few words of my own. My niece in Dol Amroth had sent me a letter asking "what the War was like for the Ladies;" her own mother, after all, had been scarce more than a baby at the time, and had scant recollection. She was a secret favorite of mine, my brother's scholarly, curly-headed girl, and I did my best to answer her wish. No sooner had the ink dried, however, when I looked down and saw the words of another woman, from some other life, and in a moment of hot frustration that had nothing to do with my niece's request, I thought that perhaps the only sure way to go about the endeavor would be to slice my palm and smear my own blood upon the page.

I am not, however, given to theatrics of that sort, and so it seems I must make do with that which remains in my mind. Perhaps it is better that way. Sometimes I speak to my husband or our friends about it, and we all report the same discrepancy between what we read and what we know, and I think that in some strange way we enjoy it, we who lived through it. It was a war for our City, for all the lands of free Men, and even for all of Middle-earth, and we know this and take pride. But by the same stroke, we all fought our own narrow, private battles that we are loath to relinquish to others, even now. We hold them greedily against our hearts like sweet, painful embers snatched from a dying fire.

Perhaps one of the reasons I see none of my own memories in the writers' tales is that every account is partitioned neatly into days and dates. _Ten March, Cair Andros is taken; 13 March, the River falls to the Enemy_. It all means so little to me. That time was but one long dim twilight. Robbed as we were of both sun and stars, each hour simply sank listlessly into the next.

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When I awoke, Fíriel was already gone. I lay on the mattress a few moments more, and performed the little ritual I had made for myself of late: three slow, deep breaths before I went out to face the long rows of the injured men and to move among the other women as we took our tally of the living and dead. On the last breath, I pushed myself up and stood barefoot in my shift, dressing as quietly as I could among the sleeping bodies in that small room.

Ioreth looked up as I re-entered the main ward, and she stopped me and caught my hands in her motherly, insistent grip.

"Grave news, child, grave news this day," she said by way of greeting. "Lord Faramir has returned from Osgiliath, they say, but he fares poorly indeed! He has taken great hurt, and they say," and she lowered her voice, "they say he is dying. And now the City ringed round with fell armies and fell beasts, and our good Captain dying!"

I took an involuntary step backwards. I had only ever seen the Steward's younger son from afar, but I had tended some of his soldiers, and from all their talk of their commander I felt as if I almost knew the man, myself. They spoke of him as men who have weathered great storms at sea are like to speak of a safe harbor.

"'They say'?" I repeated, not quite understanding. "If the Lord Faramir is dying, then why is he not here? Have our surgeons seen him?"

"Some of the men tell me he is with his father, my girl. They say that the Lord Denethor despairs, and will have none save himself attending to his son."

"But that is folly! He cannot—"

"Perhaps the Lord Steward wishes to keep the dying close at hand," a soft voice intoned behind me. I turned and saw the same young man whose cuts I had tended, the friend of the boy with the sliced throat. He looked much the same as he had the last time I saw him, sitting at his friend's side as I walked away, save that the grey crescents beneath his eyes had darkened. "Forgive me. I could not help but overhear," he added.

I sighed and shook my head. What might this one want? I wondered. "There is nothing to forgive," I said, my tone perhaps more brisk than I had intended. "I suppose that if that is the Steward's bidding, there is naught we can do to alter it, and therefore little to discuss."

"True enough, my girl," Ioreth put in, "though I still say that it gives much to speak of, even if 'tis not ours to decide. I will see you again soon enough." She patted my hand gently and bustled off, but not before casting a curious glance at the soldier.

"Is there aught I can do for you?" I asked him. I would be expected to report to the Warden in a few minutes.

"Yes, well—I never did thank you. You were very… kind to Tarondor—to my friend."

I gave a modest bob of my head. In the beginning I had been almost afraid to speak to the men who came to us fresh from the battle; they were rough and grim, and their fear was a new kind of fear, their bitterness a new kind of bitterness. But now I was practiced, and I had words to give back to them. "It is the least we can do, for those who have risked life and limb to defend us. And it was no small kindness on your part, either, that you remained there with him."

The young man shrugged. "He's gone—they took him away but a little while ago," he said quietly, and stared at the floor.

"I'm sorry."

He smiled, shaking his head quickly, as an animal might do to ward off a troublesome insect. His next words came more rapidly. "You must think me terribly strange, with what I said. I was weary indeed, and ill."

I tried to remember. "About… killing someone without seeing him?"

He nodded. "The day one man can slay another, sight unseen, would be the ending of the world, indeed. We do not wish for a different sort of war; a just end to our current one would be more than sufficient, I think."

"Yes, I should think so." I did my best to return his smile, though my black-winged dreams were now pressing much closer into my mind. "And I do not think you to be terribly strange. I can see how one might desire such a thing." What were the words he had used? _No skin and no blood._ Yes, I realized, I could see that desire clearly, myself. We were in the thick of it here, a mire of all things torn and ruptured and broken and unclean, and I could only imagine what had begat them on the field of battle. The impacts of metal against flesh, the crush of the fight, the movement against one's own will. I saw it too, for a moment, in his eyes, and felt I nearly understood. "I need to go, now," I said, "and report to my station."

"Yes, that was what I would speak to you about," he said, with a hurried gesture for me to stay a moment more. "As I have been deemed… unfit to return to battle at the moment," he began, acknowledging his own injuries with a dark, scornful glance, "I wondered if I might be of service here. I am no healer, of course, but I know my field dressings well enough, and have a ready pair of hands wherever they might be needed. I cannot sit idle." He finished with a tone of uncertain hope, as if he were a new vendor painfully eager to move his wares.

In turn, I cast an appraising gaze over him like a seasoned buyer. It was true, we might well be in need of more assistance, but he was clearly spent. The blue pupils of his eyes were ringed with red, from lack of sleep and a certain number of tears, no doubt, and he still wore his torn clothes. _Perhaps the Lord Steward wishes to keep the dying close at hand_, he had said to me.

"The best service you could do for me—for all of us," I told him, trying to summon Fíriel's firm, gentle way of speaking, "is to go and rest yourself. I promise that you will heal more quickly if you do this, and knowing that would lighten my own burden a great deal."

He stared back at me in return and I had to struggle not to look away. "I said that I cannot sit idle, good lady," he said, and the uncertainty had suddenly vanished from his voice. "Lying abed while my friends yet fight and die will do me much more ill than good—and _that_ I promise you, unless you truly believe that I would hinder you in your efforts."

There was a long moment of silence. _Valar help me_, I thought, _this one might try to stare clear through to the back of my head_.

"Very well, then," I sighed. "Let us go and see what the Warden would have from you."

------------

Several hours later I was in the dispensary. There were no windows, and the rows of glass vials winked back at me from their high shelves, reflecting candle-light.

"You ask for no little amount of poppy," said Elloth, studying her inventory with a fetching frown. Elloth, who was under the tutelage of our herbalists, was undoubtedly the prettiest girl in the Houses of Healing, and consequently the prettiest girl in the entire City for the time being. And although none us were enjoying the war, I could not help but suspect that she took a certain amount of pleasure from the knowledge of this condition. But then again, perhaps I was also slightly envious.

"I know," I replied, "but Valacar wants it. Now, may I have it, please?" I folded my arms over my chest and tried to convey just the right amount of impatience.

"It really is a lot," Elloth continued, creasing her brow as she looked at me. She was, after all, the well-learned apprentice herb-mistress, and I but a lowly blood-letter. "More than the surgeons usually ask for. 'Twould kill a man, if given all at once."

"He knows that, Ell," I said wearily. "Now, can you please get it for me?"

She shook her lovely head. "I'm sorry. Supply is very short. The herb-master said we are to dispense it only for the patients who will live." She bit her lip and narrowed her eyes. "Just as well—we should be healers and naught else, I always thought."

"Perhaps…" I said, and just behind my ribs, something snapped, like a thin thread stretched beyond its limit. I only realized what I was saying after the first words had left my mouth. "Perhaps if you came to the wards, if you saw the man that Valacar was going to work on before he told me it was beyond hope, perhaps if you saw him ripped open by some orc-blade, like a carcass in the butcher's shop, perhaps if you heard him cry out for his mother, then…" I stopped to catch my breath; my hands had made themselves into fists. "Then perhaps you might think differently on what _we healers_ should do!"

The other girl stared at me, and even in the dim light I could see the tears forming in her eyes. She was twisting her mouth in the way women do when they are making an effort to control themselves. This is not her fault, I told myself; sacrifices are necessary, in times like these…

"Valar, Ell, I'm sorry. I didn't mean—"

"No," she said, taking a quick breath through her nose, her voice noticeably higher. "It must be terrible for you, that you would speak so. Please tell Valacar that I apologize." She blinked, and though a single droplet trailed down her fair cheek, she managed to raise her chin as her eyes met mine.

_Better to apologize to the man who will now spend a longer time dying_, I thought, but I merely uttered a clumsy farewell. When I left, Elloth's face was such a beautiful picture of noble suffering that I did not feel half so sorry.

----------

"Elloth sends you her apologies," I said to Valacar when I returned to him empty-handed, "but nothing useful."

"Oh?" Valacar was among our best surgeons. He never talked down to the women in the Houses, and for that reason he was one of my favorites. Today his apprentice had been laid low with a fever, and Valacar had called me away from the main ward to help him on his rotation. At any other time his asking for me would have made me quite proud, but now I saw only the stark necessity of the situation. We had reached a point, I think, when endurance was valued higher than skill.

"They're rationing it out now. Surgeries only. Elloth told me, only for the ones who will not—" I glanced over Valacar's shoulder at the pale man lying on his surgeon's bench, then quickly looked away. He had passed out, I was relieved to note, but then, Valacar had told me that he had been going in an out of wakefulness for nearly an hour.

Valacar nodded. I had never seen him looking so tired, and it unsettled me. We were all a sight grimmer now, as if a slow poison were leaching into our veins.

"I understand the idea of it," I went on, trying to pull my thoughts together, "but it seemed as though we had so much, in the beginning. I mean, how many more days—"

"We'll find a way."

"And Elloth is such a stupid biddy, anyway, she wouldn't know about it at—"

He raised his hand slightly. "You're shouting."

I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose. He was a surgeon, after all, not some gossipy old goodwife, and had no need for a burst of girlish spite. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to." Whatever had snapped in my chest was now aching. A rushing noise filled my ears.

"You look tired," he said, not unkindly, though his voice sounded distant to me.

"No more than you."

"I suppose you're right," he smiled. His face was naturally very thin, almost to the point of gauntness, his cheekbones emerging in sharp, painful lines. He grew grave again and looked at our patient. "We'll find a way," he repeated, and he went over to the small table that held his surgeon's tools. He selected a large knife and very deliberately began to hone it with a small whetstone that was also there.

"I—oh."

"There is a spot in the north garden," he said, without looking up from his work, his words undercut by the scrape of metal on rock, "a little circle of young trees, with a white stone fountain at its center and a small bench. You may not have seen it, yet."

"I think I know it."

"Good. Pleasant, is it not? I want you to go and sit there and rest, and come back in ten minutes."

"But—"

He looked up at me, his face neutral. "Ten minutes. I promise I'll be here when you return." Then he turned his attention back to the blade in his hands.

----------

When I went out to the gardens, I did not find Valacar's little circle. I simply rounded the corner of a high green hedge, and a moment later I found myself on my knees next to a flower-bed, retching. Breathing hard, I shifted myself so that I was sitting upon the grass with my legs tucked under me, face to face with a small white statue of a lovely maiden. I stared at her blank, round eyes until the world ceased spinning. She looked very solemn, but enviable in her pale stone serenity.

"Are you all right?" I turned around and saw a well-worn pair of boots on the ground beside me. Looking up, I saw that they belonged to my insistent soldier friend, standing above me with an expression of mild concern. Had he been witness to that whole pitiable performance?

"Fine—fine, thank you," I stammered. He offered me a callused hand and helped me up. I sat down on a small bench near the statue. He sat down as well, at a respectful distance—there was already some impropriety to it, of course, a girl and a young man alone together like this. He was wearing a clean shirt, and his dark hair fell more neatly about his face.

"It seems like it would take a great deal to upset you," he said quietly. I gave a mute shrug in reply. "I'm sorry if I was rude to you, before," he continued, after a pause. "It was not my intent."

"There was no harm done," I said, tonelessly.

"This is quite a place," he observed. Then he was quiet again, facing my silence for the second time in as many days. "Do you want…would you like me to leave?"

I looked at him, and wondered what he knew of these gardens. During my lifetime, entire portions of Minas Tirith had been left empty and silent, the streets and buildings falling into disrepair. Through all this, however, the Houses and their beloved gardens had remained well-kempt—this was no small source of pride for our Warden. The hedges were trimmed back nicely, the flowers well-tended, the fountains and statues kept free of cracks, all for the benefit of those who came seeking healing and respite. But now the sky was a murky, opaque shade of brown, and the loudest clashes from the battles below us reached even to the sixth circle. All our meticulous care seemed to be a mere trifle, a quaint little joke when set against the chaos that was now beginning to consume us, and I realized I did not care to be alone here.

"No. No, please, stay if you like." I noticed that the leather bag of a courier had taken the place of the sword he had worn when I treated him. "Tell me, did the Warden set you to work?"

"Yes, and I am grateful that you took me to him." He gave a short bark of laughter. "Although I must say, I am certainly the oldest errand-boy in the entire City. The moment I saw your Warden, I should have known he would not be one to let a simple man-at-arms lay hands on his patients!"

"Message-taking is an important duty," I assured him, and he gave a conceding shrug. "And how are those cuts?"

"Mending, thanks to you. And what have you done, since we parted ways?"

I went through the duties in my mind, trying to boil them down. "I helped to set a broken leg, I fetched a good deal of clean water, assisted in the surgery-rooms and…" I ventured a sidelong glance at him. "I made an apprentice herb-mistress cry."

He raised an eyebrow. "Really? Was it that very pretty one?"

I straightened up on the bench. "There are no very pretty apprentice herbalists in Minas Tirith. They're all plain as cows."

He snorted, and laughed again. "Then you must have some very comely cattle." I smiled in spite of myself.

At that moment, a high unearthly shriek pierced the air. It was as if the sound of Valacar's knife scraping against the whetstone had been enlarged a thousand-fold, but there was a new malicious depth to it, as well. There was death and rot and dark triumph in that noise, and I felt as though it might stop my heart beating within my breast. We both covered our ears.

"What _was_ that?" I whispered when the abominable utterance had passed. I shuddered at the chill that had suddenly come over me; it was as if the coldness were lodged within my own body, as if there were some icy mass at my center.

"That was the Black Captain or one of his ilk, most likely," he replied, clasping his hands together. His breathing was audible as he looked around quickly, as though said Captain were lurking behind the trees and hedges at this very second; I could have believed that, so closely had the noise rattled inside my ears.

"Have you heard the stories?" he finally asked. I nodded. "They have come on winged steeds, horrible creatures—it is said that the Dark Lord himself horsed them so."

"The Dark Lord," I repeated, closing my eyes. "Tell me," I said slowly, "what other news of the battle?" We had changed places, I realized, for now I sounded very much like he had when he inquired about the chances of his wounded friend.

He drew a deep breath, and leaned back on the bench, resting his weight upon the heels of his hands. "As your good dame Ioreth said, the City is now besieged. There is a great host, more orcs and men than anyone can count." As he laid out the statements, one after another, it became clear to me that this was a message he had delivered before, or else had heard spoken often. "And trolls, and all manner of fell creatures under the hold of Mordor. They have brought great towers and engines with them, and will not rest until the outer wall has been breached. Shall I go on?"

My stomach tightened, but I nodded. "It would take a great deal to upset me, sir," I said, giving his phrase back to him as evenly as I could manage.

He gave another smile, which vanished almost as soon as it formed on his lips. "Fair enough," he assented, and stared up into the darkened sky. "Rohan has been summoned to our aid, but there has been no sign yet of King Théoden's men, and we know not what numbers he has at his disposal… By the time they arrive… _if_ they arrive, it may be too late for Minas Tirith."

I dug my fingers into the edge of the bench. It was one thing to toil under a cloud of dread, another thing entirely to hear the long-feared news in plain words from the mouth of someone else. "So we come to the end, then?" I thought of my mother, and realized I would never see her again.

"Aye, perhaps," he nodded. "But nothing yet is cer—" He was interrupted by another dreadful screech. The same wave of ice washed over me, and to my ears, at least, this call seemed even closer than the first. I shut my eyes, and even after the cry was finished, I kept my hands clamped to the sides of my head, for I could have sworn that I heard its echoes rebounding off the white stones of our City, or else it had merely left its black mark vivid upon my mind.

After some moments I felt another hand over one of mine, and I opened my eyes. He gently pulled my hand away from my ear, and held my fingers between his palms. I let my other hand drop. His grip was rough but warm.

"But nothing yet is certain," he finished.

No, nothing yet is certain, I wanted to say. Except that we will soon run out of pain-draughts, and that my favorite surgeon has no doubt finished driving his knife through his patient's heart. Nothing yet is certain, save for that hideous death-call, which seems now more real to me than all the bread and water I have tasted in my life…

But I said nothing. I simply let him hold my hand until I felt warm again, and then for several moments more. I looked down at our fingers, pressed together over the cool stone of the bench. We were only sitting in a garden, that was all, and for the time we were safe.

"Bold of you," I remarked dryly, but made no move to pull away.

"You took care of me, once," he replied. "And Tarondor." He carefully released my hand, depositing it into my lap as if it were some breakable object. He stood up. "Thank you for your company. Mayhap I will see you later."

"Mayhap." I watched him go through the arched doorway that led back into the Houses. My legs felt stiff as I rose, as if I had been sitting for hours instead of minutes. I dusted off the front of my skirt once more, and went back inside through those same doors, because Valacar would surely need me again.


	5. Kindness

I spent the evening hours tending to the dead. We carefully wrapped the corpses (How foolish I had been, to think that all our linen would be for bandages only!) and carried them to the center atrium—from there, they would be taken away to be burned as a guard against pestilence. Some of the more able-bodied men had volunteered their assistance; a few of them showed me how to strip away the more complicated pieces of armor, which proved helpful.

"Do you always give your dead to the fire?" one of the soldiers asked me. His faint accent told me he was from Lossarnach; the gentle lilt in his tone was not unlike Ioreth's.

"No," I replied. "There are tombs, usually."

He considered this for a moment. "That sits ill with me, the thought of lying between the stones." He shook his head. "When I die, I want to be covered in earth. It seems the more natural way of things." He closed another pair of glassy eyes with a gentle pass of his hand. "Meaning no offense to your Minas Tirith customs, of course," he quickly added.

"None taken."

"We might all have a tomb of stone, soon," one of the other men put in, "whether we wish it or not."

The man from Lossarnach shot a sharp glance at the other soldier. "Hush!"

We went back to work.

----------

I had never been a particularly imaginative girl, but now that I was finally removed from childhood, my mind began to bloom with subterfuges and fantasies. These men had never been alive, I convinced myself, and if I followed far enough along that route, then the next natural conclusion was that they were not men, at all. The dead were nothing but weights that pinned the living to the earth.

But at night, I dreamt that the corpses sat up from their shrouds and spoke to me. I was not frightened during the dream, but when I awoke I could not go back to sleep. I lay staring into the darkness, and then I got up and went to the kitchens to make sweet rolls.

----------

The dough was solid comfort in my fingers, and I savored the graininess of the flour on my palms. In the silence of the empty kitchens, I tried my best to slap the soft mass down to the tabletop with impressive, authoritative smacks the way that Cook used to, but I could not get the rhythm quite right. Had Cook been there, she would have scolded me, then brushed her thick fingers gently against my cheek in that peculiar manner of hers, marking me with the lightest trace of flour. But she was gone from the Houses, now, along with all the kitchen-staff, cleaning-men and serving-maids.

I had known, of course, that everyone not needed directly for the war would have to be cleared out. Still, I had felt a pang of shock on that morning after the last evacuations when I came into the kitchens and found her gone, for she had ruled over these large, warm rooms as surely as the Steward himself governed Minas Tirith. She was a formidable woman with big hands, and no one really seemed to know what her name was, or if indeed she had one to begin with. She moved about swiftly with sharp orders on her tongue, always accompanied by the clang of pots and pans, and no one dared contradict her.

But children were her weakness, particularly the nervous, shy young boys and girls who arrived at the Houses to begin their apprenticeships. She would wink conspiratorially at us, and press an apple or a bit of honey cake into our hands, and we adored her in turn. The group of apprentices with which I had entered had been the last one of normal size to come to the Houses. In the years that followed, the numbers declined rapidly, although in truth they had been steadily dwindling since my own mother had been a girl. There were no questions about the boys, for more and more were going for soldiers with each passing season, but the dearth of girls was a small mystery. With the marked lack of children in the Houses, my peers and I had been destined to remain always as Cook's "babes," even if by now we were nineteen and twenty and twenty-one.

Now I sighed, because the kitchens were empty, and because I knew my dough wouldn't be quite right. It never was, really, but I was resolved to die with sweet rolls in my stomach. At the sound of footfalls, I looked up to see one of my fellow "babes" enter the room—Valacar's apprentice.

"Hello, Laeron."

"Oh—hello," he replied, looking startled to see me. In the years we had known one another, Laeron had grown from a nervous, lanky young boy to a nervous, lanky young man. I suspected that the Warden had paired him with Valacar in hopes that Laeron might absorb some of that surgeon's calm, decisive nature for himself—though if that were the case, it did not seem to have worked very well thus far.

"How is your fever?"

"Ah…finally broken, thank you." He walked over to a set of small cabinets that stood against the wall and began to rummage around. "I'm going back to work, soon. Just making some tea, to be sure that the sickness stays away for good."

"An excellent idea."

"Mm…" he nodded quickly and flicked his gaze over to me. "Would you like some, too, then?"

"No, thank you. Do you want a sweet roll when they're finished?"

"That's _sweet_ rolls?" he said, turning around to eye the dough in my hands. "Yes, please, of course." And then he dropped the tea-kettle lid, which fell to the floor with a resounding clatter.

When his tea had finished brewing, he sat across from me, hunched over the steaming cup while I formed the dough into rolls.

"You…you were with Valacar this afternoon, weren't you?" he asked cautiously after several silent minutes.

"Yes, I was." I set down another finished roll.

"Nothing…happened, did it?" I could see his fingers twitch as they gripped the mug.

"What do you mean?"

"Nothing out of sorts, say."

"No," I swallowed, and pinched the next handful of dough so tightly that it was good as ruined, and I had to start over again. "Nothing out of sorts. Why?"

"Because, well…he was called up to speak with Lord Aradîr today. In the Master's offices." He took a hurried sip of tea. "Aradîr seldom calls anyone up to meet with him like that. And even when he comes down to make a visit to the Houses, he rarely speaks to Valacar. If ever there's a problem with the staff, it's the business of the Warden. Everyone knows that."

"And Valacar didn't say why he was summoned?"

"No. It sounded as though he might not know, himself. Although he never tells me anything, anyway." He took another sip. "At any rate, he might have been more likely to tell you. He likes you better, I think," he added quickly.

"That can't be true, Laeron."

"Today he said that you could be argumentative, at times…"

I set down another roll. "I am _not_ argumentative!"

"…but he was smiling a bit, when he said it." Laeron rotated the cup in his thin anxious hands. So different from his teacher. I remembered the way Valacar had looked as he dragged his knife over the whetstone this afternoon. A model surgeon, calm and decisive. Had those qualities served him poorly today? "You'll keep that close, won't you? The business with Aradîr, I mean."

"Yes. Yes, of course." When I had returned to the surgery corridor after sitting in the gardens, the man was dead and Valacar was pulling a sheet over him. We avoided one another's eyes for a long time after that.

----------

Naturally, the rolls came out burnt. Laeron was polite about it.

"Well, it's not so bad, really," he said. "They're warm, that's the thing. Much better than all that dry bread." Somewhere below us, through layers of stone, a low rumble drifted up from the battle.

"And much blacker," I replied. I took another bite. It was the aftertaste, more than the actual flavor, that was a problem. Just a hint of charred bitterness, which was like a sweetness that had tried too hard and ruined itself. That was fitting, I decided.

"I might go down," he said abruptly. "Down to the battle, I mean."

I stopped mid-chew. "What? To fight?"

"Well, why else?"

"But we need you here."

"They also need men on the walls. Maybe even more than we need surgeons."

His fingers drummed lightly against the table top. I wondered if he had ever even held a sword. "Laeron…would you send _me_ down to the battle?"

"You? Of course not!" he snorted. But then my meaning fell into place, and he stared into his mug. "That's not the same."

"Well, forgive me, but you're no more a warrior than I am!"

He looked up at me again. "Well, I think that…well, there's a choice, you see. And I think I would rather at least _try_ to help, in the end, than wait here and…" He trailed off.

"And be slaughtered, you mean?" I stared at him.

"That wasn't what I meant!" Another rumble came up from the battle, and then we were both silent. His hands still clutched nervously at his cup of tea, as if seeking a point of anchor there. _For the Valar's sake, Laeron_, I thought, _just be still for a moment. Just one moment._ The wish was as bitter and urgent as the burnt taste in my mouth.

Strange, the things I wanted. Before all of this, I could see all my desires spooled out before me for miles and miles, the languid wants of someone who believed firmly in the coming year, and the year after that, and the year after that. I had wanted a dress like the elegant red gown I had glimpsed in the milliner's shop; I wanted my brothers and cousins to be old enough so that they would cease running wildly through the house; and I wanted, one day, to have a baby girl who would fall asleep in my arms. But now life was as narrow as the aisle between the sickbeds, and if the things I currently wished for had shrunk to match that proportion, then the wishes themselves had doubled in force and clarity. I wanted to work my hands in the dough until my fingers cramped and I forgot the warmth of fresh blood. Lying in the darkness beside Fíriel, I wanted to roll over and bury my face in the back of her neck and breath chamomile all night. I wanted to go back and find that injured soldier in the gardens once more. And more than anything else I wanted my mother to be here. Just to see her again.

But I was greedy, and I knew it.

"If I do go," Laeron began quietly, "do you think you might… Well… Would you tell Elloth goodbye, for me?"

I put my elbows up on the table so that I could rest my head between the heels of my hands. "You tell her, Laeron. Tell her, yourself."

"Or…" he said, and his mouth might have twitched a little, "I could just give her one of these sweet rolls."

"Yes," I replied. "And she'd love you forever."

----------

Even in the dark I knew the southeast gardens well, and after leaving the kitchens I cut through them to go to the south ward. Picture a rough cross within a circle, and you have the shape of the Houses of Healing; the buildings form the cross's arms, branching out from the center atrium, and the gardens, in turn, fill out the circle in the spaces between. No few Wardens and healers have questioned the efficiency of this design over the years, but so many parts of the White City are set in stone, in both theory and in fact, and so the Houses stand more or less as they always have.

A man was sitting on the ground by the nearest entrance to the south ward, and as I came closer I recognized him. He had been brought in with a foot wound two days ago, and now he was seated with his back against the wall with his legs stretched out before him. As soon as he had been able, he had sat up in bed with a knife and began to silently whittle little figures out of odd scraps of wood he had somehow procured, one after the other, his face blank as he worked. The figures themselves had no faces at all. They were plain and crude, all more or less the size of a child's palm. They did not have any sort of balance to them, and so could not stand up by themselves; he set row after row of them lying either on their backs or their fronts. Because they had no faces, it was impossible to tell which.

He appeared to be carving at this very moment, though I could not think how he could manage it in this lack of light. He looked up as I approached.

"Would you like a sweet roll?" I asked him. I was carrying the more salvageable specimens in a knotted-up cloth bundle. "They're burnt, but only a little."

"Well, that's good of you," he replied. His voice was slow and rough, as if he had just woken up from a long sleep. He put down the knife and the wood scrap. "Come over here." I did, and he looked up at me through the darkness. "I know you. Don't I?"

"I was working in the wards when you came in."

"Well, perhaps there was some other time, as well. Busy girl, are you?"

"I suppose so."

"And you were born here?"

"Yes."

"Busy Minas Tirith girl," he nodded, as if he had just discovered something important. "And did they make you stay here?"

"No. No, I wanted to."

"A brave one, then." He gave one more strange, self-congratulatory nod. "Does what needs to be done." He inclined his head to one side. "May I ask you one more thing?"

"All right." This was getting tiresome.

I had to lean in because his voice was low. As he spoke, he took a bit of the cloth at the hem of my skirt and pinched it between his thumb and forefinger.

"No, I don't think so," I replied when he was finished. I stepped backwards and pulled my skirt from his grip. This was not the first time I had been propositioned.

"With some of them, it's not really their fault," Fíriel had told me. "Men are lonelier creatures than women." She gave me a meaningful look. "Depending on how many you get, you can afford to be selective." She had smiled slyly while she watched my face as I tried to determine whether or not she was being serious, and then she had walked away.

The man sitting below me did not change his expression at all, but simply picked up the knife and figure and went back to work.

"Did you know that the Gates have been breached?" he said. I stared at him. "So I don't see what you're holding out for."

I dug my fingernails into my palms and turned to go inside the ward, but his next words froze me.

"You don't know kindness, little one. You can't tell kindness from killing."

I drew a sharp breath and turned back towards him, which was, of course, what he had wanted. He smiled horribly and pressed the tip of his knife into the little piece of wood in his fingers. Whatever he knew and however he knew it, it meant little if we were all to die soon, anyway. But now I realized I could see him more clearly; I could see that his hands were strangely mottled, and that his face was drawn, and I realized, too, that I felt warmer than I had in days. There was the sound of horns, distant but unmistakable. I turned away swiftly and passed through the south ward, and from there I ran to the eastern walls, where a score of others had already gathered: The Sun had risen, and Rohan had come at last.


	6. One of Us

"…rode with the coming of the dawn…"

"…and I saw it—dark smoke rising…"

"…black ships, sailing…"

The Houses had never been this crowded. Everywhere I turned, there were voices and standing bodies. Our soldiers and guardsmen and message-lads were there; new arrivals, fair-haired men from the Mark, were also to be seen. A murmur, low and urgent and edged with hope, was passing through the crowd.

"…slew the Black Captain…"

"…army of dead men, grey and fell, and I saw it…"

"…_healed_ him, though he was dying…"

I stood on my toes and tried to peer over the forest of heads and shoulders that had suddenly grown up in the north ward. The tightest knot of people seemed to be wound around a tall, dark man whose face I could not see. Our Warden was making his way through the crowd to stand near him, speaking above the others' voices, trying to enforce some semblance of order; it was unusual to see him like this, for he seldom ever shouted or spoke very loudly—but then again, he seldom had need to. I returned to the flats of my feet, then went up again. There were no other staff members in sight. The Warden's gaze finally lighted on me, and he beckoned me over with a motion that told me I should be quick about it.

By the time I had shouldered my way through the crowd to stand before the Warden, the tall man was gone. In his place was another, who stood serenely as the Warden spoke to him. The Warden turned to me and placed a heavy hand on my shoulder. He looked exhausted, but there was a strange sort of light in his eyes.

"Listen carefully," he said, speaking rapidly and firmly. "A man from the North, a Ranger who came to the battle, has come to the Houses. He has healed the Lord Faramir, and two others who were grievous near to death, and he will yet heal many more of our men." He paused and glanced at the one beside him. "And this is the Lord Elladan, his…" He lingered on a note of uncertainty.

"Kinsman," Lord Elladan put in gracefully. His voice was deep but oddly sweet-sounding. His face was unlined, though he did not seem young to me.

"…kinsman," the Warden repeated, although his countenance betrayed a moment's puzzled skepticism. "Lord Elladan and his brother are healers in the way of their own people, and they have most kindly offered their aid, as well." He stepped to the side to avoid further jostling by the crowd, and his grip on my shoulder tightened. "You will take him first to the ones whom _we_ cannot save, for those are the ones in greatest need of gifts such as his. Stay in the north ward; the others have already gone to the south, and to the surgery corridor. Understand?"

I nodded, although my eyes were now on Lord Elladan. _…in the way of their own people…_ So he was not a Man, at all—a strange, nervous thrill passed through my heart. The Elf smiled at me, and I realized I was staring very rudely.

"Good," said the Warden, releasing me. He gave me a final glance, then looked at Elladan, and then he straightened his spine before disappearing into the throng once more, as if steeling himself to face the unfamiliar street-scene that had once been our Houses.

----------

So I led Lord Elladan to the dying men. They were easy enough to find, for we had tied our little black markers to the posts of their beds. Long before he had finished, I realized that the Elf could have found them by himself, without such crude signs affixed; but he was a foreigner, and someone important, as well, and the Warden most likely thought it would have been poor manners to let him go to work completely unaided, even if the only available escort was a callow young slip of a healer-girl.

I could scarcely take my gaze off of him. He moved with an unnerving silence. His eyes were grey, like my people's, but wholly dissimilar. Our eyes are the shade of storm clouds, and shadows on white stone. His eyes were the color of rain. He would shut them for long moments as he tended to the men, as if he were trying to recall something from long ago. He laid his slender fingers upon pale foreheads and spoke words in his own language. Occasionally he would ask to use an instrument or a bit of herb from my kit, but mostly he worked empty-handed; to this very day I cannot explain exactly what it was that he did. It seemed to me as though he were conducting a private transaction with each patient, building up a tale with his hands and voice, until it all changed, and the dying man returned and opened his eyes because he realized that the story had been his all along, and it was not yet finished as he had first supposed. But those were most likely my own personal fancies, for I was both tired and astonished.

A few times that night he would look over at me from the bedside where he was seated, and slowly shake his head; this signal I understood well enough. But even the ones he could not save seemed to relax under his touch, and their breathing would ease. I had begun by leading him down the center aisle in the north ward, but eventually I simply followed in his wake, quietly watching him and slipping the black cloths one after the other from the bedposts.

Finally we arrived at the far end of the ward. The Elf looked out over the rows of beds and men.

"And that is all, for the time?" he asked quietly. His tone held an edge of weariness—if indeed his people ever wearied, at all.

I glanced around rather stupidly. "Yes…I suppose it is."

"Then I will go and seek my brothers." He turned to me once more. "My thanks. It is no easy station you hold."

I could think of nothing to say in reply to that, so I merely curtsied as deeply as I could manage. Perhaps it is only another of my time-blurred fancies, but I thought I caught an instant's bemused surprise in those rain-colored eyes. Lord Elladan smiled again, bowing gracefully, and then he turned and was gone.

----------

Afterwards I walked unthinking to the northeast gardens and sat on the ground with my back against an old tree. I had not slept for nearly an entire day and night, but I felt light, as if my bones were hollow and my thoughts were spun of air. Several minutes passed before I realized I still had all the black cloth markers looped over my left arm. I slipped them from my sleeve and counted them, laid them on the ground beside me, and counted them again.

He had done what we could not. I closed my eyes, and the evening air burned its sweetness into my chest with every breath I took.

----------

"Hello?"

I blinked. My back was ridged with soreness and my head felt like a metal weight.

"I'm sorry! I didn't think you were sleeping."

"I was not asleep," I protested, rubbing a hand over my face. Crouched before me on the grass was the young soldier. The first thing I noticed was that he had removed the dressings from his forehead.

"All right," he smiled.

"I wasn't."

He settled himself beside me, sitting with his knees drawn up against his chest, a position that made him look very much like a small boy. "You must like gardens. Every time I meet you, you seem to be sitting in one."

"Only twice." I stood up to shake the stiffness from my legs and to rub at my lower back. For some odd reason, I did not wish him to know quite how glad I was to see him. I had learned to guard my grief, and so perhaps it felt only natural to shield my joy, as well.

"You _must_ like gardens," he repeated, a gleam in his eye. "For you are a healer, and surely you love to care for all things, and watch them grow."

"You must have some very strange notions about healers, sir," I replied with a lift of my brow. He laughed—that short, peculiar bark of a laugh that he seemed to carry with him. "And because you are a soldier, I suppose you like to cut things down, and that you love everything that is sharp and bloody?" He did not laugh at that.

"I'm sorry," I began. "I should not have—"

"It's all right. Your meaning is well taken—never judge a healer."

It was quiet for a moment, and then I sat down before him. "And I will never judge a soldier. Agreed?"

He nodded slowly. "Very well." He busied himself with his leather bag. "Have you heard?" he asked, rather offhandedly.

"Heard about what?"

"About everything. All of it."

"Most likely not," I admitted.

"Then I have a great many stories to tell you, if you would like to hear."

"Very well; and I have some stories for you, as well." I was relieved that he did not seem angry with me.

I leaned back against the tree, and he told me first of Mordor's great beasts and war-engines, and of the monstrous battering-ram that had broken down the gates, and of the ride of the Rohirrim, and the death of King Théoden by the hands of the Black Captain. Then he told me of the woman who had ridden to the battle as a man, and the strange little creature from the North whom she had brought with her.

"They are in the Houses at this very moment, I think!" I put in. "Ioreth has told me about them."

"Yes, they are here in the Sixth Circle." Last of all he told me of the army of pale specters who came to the aid of the West. I marveled silently as the fragments and rumors I had been hearing all day began to grow and take whole, solid form. He had some bread and cheese in his bag, and he shared that with me while I told him about the new healers who had come to our City, and about the Elf-lord and how he had aided those whom the rest of us had left for dying. All told, the young soldier possessed the greater number of stories, but I held the advantage of having seen with my own eyes the ones I had told, and so we agreed that we were more or less equal on tale-telling counts.

"I can scarcely believe any of it," I admitted, "and yet all the same, it must be true."

"Aye," he agreed. "It feels like being on the ridge of some mountain, but not yet at its peak. We can see naught of the great stone mass, save for the bit on which we stand at this very moment."

"If it is like that, then we will not be able to see the entire mountain until we have come down altogether, and are very far away indeed." He nodded his concurrence, and we ate in companionable silence for a few minutes. The next time he spoke, his voice was low and hesitant.

"That Lord Elladan, whom you told me about…do you suppose he might have helped Tar', as well?"

"No." My reply was so quick that it hung in the air between us almost before he had finished his question. I should have allowed for a greater pause to show him that I had at least considered it. He bit his lip and stared at me again, that same sharp blue stare that had compelled me to lead him to the Warden the day before. But this time I matched his gaze. A "yes," or even a "perhaps" would have started him down a winding, poisonous path of might-have-beens, and I thought I should try to keep him from that road. Strange, the notion that a young girl should desire to protect a trained soldier, but the thought stood resolute in me. It must have shown on my face, as well, for at the last he did not question me further. He simply gave a slow nod and turned away to stare at some undetermined point in the distance.

Then he stood up. "I need to return to work," he said quietly.

"Me, too," I replied, finally realizing that I had lost track of time once more. We were perched on the perilous mountain ridge, after all, and there was still much to be done. "Thank you again."

"The pleasure was mine," he smiled, and turned to go. As he did, something else occurred to me.

"Wait," I said. "You'd better tell me your name. In case I see you again."

He stopped and looked thoughtful, as if this were information that he did not impart to everyone. "Very well. But promise not to laugh."

"Why would I laugh?"

"Because it's 'Beren.'"

"That's a fine name."

He made a face, and once more he seemed very young. "My mother had romantic sensibilities. You should have heard all the teasing when I was a lad; you know how boys are." He sighed, then grinned again. "Tar' was the worst, actually. He never stopped, even when all the others outgrew it."

"He was faithful, then."

"Faithful," he laughed. "I suppose so." He reached down and took my hand and pressed it tightly. I thought that if I tried hard enough, I might memorize the pattern of calluses on his palm and the way in which he curled his fingertips inward. "Take care."

"And you, as well."

After he had left, I shook my head. "Beren," I said to myself, and went off to find the Warden again.

----------

"Lord Faramir is very kind," Elloth was saying to me. "And," she added, leaning conspiratorially over the table, "_very_ handsome." She considered the cards in her graceful hand for a moment before making her play. "Your turn."

I blinked at my own hand for less than a second before setting down my own card of choice. I was playing mechanically, without any thought; it hardly mattered, however, because Elloth invariably beat me at cards, anyway. She seemed to have an uncanny sense for the balance of the deck, for the numbers and the workings of things. That, and a near-flawless memory for small objects. The herbalists were supposed to keep a detailed tally of every quantity of every item that entered and exited the dispensary. Most staff members made marks as they worked, but Elloth wrote down all of her notes at the end of each of her shifts, as if she were recalling the lines of a favorite poem. She never made a mistake. I had attempted, on several occasions, to slip a flask or a bit of some obscure root from the shelf while her back was turned, to see if I could throw off her perfect count, but somehow these silent subtractions always seemed to end up in her notes, as well. It was rather unnerving, and more than a little irritating.

"I was sent in to his rooms to give him his breakfast, today," she said, "only due to the absence of the maid-servants, of course. And when he thanked me, he also asked me my name, and my position, and how I had been faring here." She laid down another card. "Very courteous and soft-spoken—much more a gentleman or a scholar than a warrior, I should think."

I nodded mutely. Elloth's speaking voice was really quite pleasant, and when I stepped back from my mind and let the words blend into one another like meaningless sounds, her continuous talk was actually somewhat soothing.

It was my turn again: spades. Today a number of us had gone down to the lower circles and seen where the stone had been wrecked and crushed like bread crumbs. There were corpses everywhere, men and orcs both, tangled on the ground. We could give no white shrouds to these ones; the only courtesy we could grant our fallen soldiers was not to burn them in the same fire as their enemies.

"…it has been said that the Steward always favored his elder son over his younger, but I cannot see how that could be, myself…"

"Check them for letters," one of the captains on the Second Circle said. Some of them had small rolls of paper tucked in the folds of their clothing: In the event of my death. The bodies were bloated from heat and time, their skins stretched taut in places. The air was full of smoke, and the smell was unbearable.

When I was a little girl I had sometimes gone down with my mother to the big, crowded, noisy market on this level. I always clutched her hand tightly because I was terrified of being lost. Today the only corner I could recognize was the place where the flower seller's stand had been; now there was the body of a man. He was on his back, eyes open and staring at the sky.

Elloth made her final play, and won. She did not smile, but took it all as a matter of course.

"Let me see your hand." I showed her my cards. "You were very close," she conceded. "Next time pay more attention to diamonds."

A group of surgeons had been sent down to assess the conditions of those survivors who could not be moved all the way up to the Houses. Valacar glanced over at me as I coughed convulsively into a handkerchief I was carrying. I had been holding it over my nose and mouth, but it was not doing me any good, and later I would throw it away.

"Once," he said quietly, "when I was a boy, there was a great storm. And in the morning, after the sea had rolled back again, there was a great mass of wreckage on the shore, snarled and twisted into itself."

I coughed again. My eyes were watering from the smoke and the smell. "Were there bodies, too?"

"No. But dead things; splintered wood and snaking ropes of seaweed. This all reminds me of that, somehow." He glanced at me again and shook his head quickly. "Well, I'm sorry. You didn't need to hear that, so I don't know why I told you. Here." He handed me another handkerchief and walked away. It was not until much later that I realized I had forgotten to ask him about Lord Aradîr.

For the following shift, Elloth was sent down to the Second Circle, and I remained in the Houses. When she returned, she did not ask to play cards again.

----------

The Rohirrim fascinated me; I had never seen so many fair-haired men in one place before. They looked strong and loose-limbed when they moved, as if they were always making ready to spring astride their mounts, for Ioreth had told me that they practically lived in the saddle. At first I was timid around them, because for some reason I had always been terrified of horses, and these warriors seemed to live and breathe the beasts. But later I liked to speak with the men from the Mark whenever I got the chance; their speech had a lovely slow lilt to it, as if their voices themselves were rolling forwards over the distant plains of their country. Even the ones who were laid low with wounds, their backs propped against pillows, maintained a lift to their chins that was proud but not haughty. Mostly they were very polite, and never glanced away from you when you spoke to them.

So it was that the Warden found me after the card game, listening to a long-haired horseman while I changed the bandage on his leg. He had a daughter about my age, he was telling me, and I reminded him of her. Her hair was lighter than mine, and she was a fair bit taller than I was, and not quite so slender (with no offense meant to me, of course—I couldn't help it). But all the same, I reminded him of her. Perhaps something about the eyes…

Smiling, the Warden stood by the head of the man's bed and asked how he was faring, and then he moved over towards me and spoke very softly.

"When you finish with this man, you will go and speak to Lord Aradîr in his offices." I tied off another section of bandage and turned round to look at the Warden; the expression on his face did not invite me to ask any questions. "He's asked for you. That is all," he said. It seemed to me to be the sort of voice that mothers revert to when small children ask them where it is that infants come from.

----------

I went to wash my hands and face and put on a clean smock, tracing the possibilities in my mind. The soldier who had propositioned me the night before was sitting on the edge of one of the beds in the south ward. His eyes went from his carving-knife to me, but I made a point of not looking at him as I passed. As I went by one of the entryways to the surgery corridor, I saw Valacar—this was odd, because he usually worked in the rooms to the center, not on the south end.

"Valacar," I said, "I've been called out to speak to—"

"Aradîr?" he finished for me.

I nodded. "And why might that be?"

Valacar sighed. He was looking more tired than usual, standing there in his grey coat. He should not wear that color, I thought—all of our surgeons wore grey, but on some men it looked like mourning. He glanced around once, quickly, and then moved closer to me and lowered his voice.

"You've done nothing wrong," he said, "but I may have made a mistake."

"What do you mean?"

"There are laws," he said, "concerning the taking of lives under various circumstances." One of the possibilities in my mind coiled itself up tightly as I remembered the dying soldier on Valacar's bench, the knife on the whetstone. "And some men tend to differ in the…interpretations of these laws. You should just protect yourself, if it comes to that."

"From _who_?" I asked. "Lord Aradîr?"

Valacar stepped back. "He's a powerful man," he remarked mildly, as if he were commenting on an excess of salt in his soup or a small cloud over the horizon. "I'm very sorry for this," he said, growing grave once more. "We'll talk later." He turned to go. "I'll not keep you any longer."

"Wait!" Bits of theories and recollections were spinning between my ears, but for some reason the one that seemed to matter least was the one that leapt to my throat at that moment. He looked back at me. His eyes were a shade lighter than his tunic.

"Earlier today," I began, "you said you had seen a wreck on the shore, when you were a boy. Where was that wreck?"

His careful surgeon's hands seemed to relax at his sides, momentarily. "That was in Dol Amroth." His voice was no longer urgent, but distant. "Where I grew up. My father sent me to the City to do the second part of my apprenticeship."

"Really?" I paused to take in this fact. "I never knew that. I had always assumed that you were one of us—that you were from Minas Tirith, I mean. Of course you're one of us," I groped awkwardly to correct myself. Valacar just gave a faint smile at that.

"It's the accent, I suppose," I explained. "I've never heard you speak with a coastal accent."

"I used to," he shrugged. "Some things are easy to unlearn."

I should tell Beren about the unlearning the next time I saw him, I thought as I left the Houses and stepped out on to the flagstones of the Sixth Circle. He seemed like he would be the type of person to appreciate it. The air was warm with sunlight and smoke, but my hands were cold.


	7. Healers Canon

When I reached the entryway of the building which housed Lord Aradîr's offices, I gave my name to the dark-garbed attendant who was standing watch. He nodded once, briskly, and led me through the doors and then down a wide windowless corridor. The hall was busy, and full of echoing footfalls. The men we passed on the way gave me brief curious glances: houses of state and bureaucracy are not places for women. We came to Aradîr's rooms, and the attendant went in before me and announced my arrival, bowing.

The man behind the desk in the office looked up and smiled, his keen light-colored eyes glancing up at me. I had seen Lord Aradîr several times before, on the occasions when he came to visit the Houses, but had seldom been in such close quarters with him, nor had he ever spoken to me directly. He had a pleasant youthful face; he had his hands out in front of him to reposition an inkwell, and I could see that the only rings he wore on his fingers were a pair of plain, slender bands; wedding rings, no doubt. Quite different from some other noblemen I had seen, whose fingers were loaded with heavy gold and silver crests and seals, announcing their station and their lineage.

"My lord," I said, dropping a curtsey.

"Good afternoon, my good lady." His voice was quiet and measured. He dismissed the attendant with a nod.

"Please, sit," he said, motioning to the single chair that stood before the desk. He did not look at me as I settled down, but kept his eyes and hands busy with the papers in front of him. I glanced about the room, which was large and airy and well-furnished; the position of Master of the Houses of Healing was a prestigious one, my mother had told me. Lord Aradîr's chair was placed so that he was seated with his back to the office's large windows that looked out on a courtyard. The top of his desk was covered in neat stacks of parchment—affairs of state must still be accounted for in these dire times, I imagined; the City must still be maintained and ordered. Now that I am older, I sometimes think of that office and wonder how our War must have looked in the corridors of the Sixth Circle during those days, with battles and deaths and reprieves all turned to the flatness of paper and ink.

"And how do you fare?" he asked me, still seemingly preoccupied with his paperwork.

"Well enough, my lord."

He smiled again. "That is what some of my colleagues might call a 'diplomatic response.'"

I was not sure whether or not that was a compliment.

"I assume you are somewhat weary with your labors, at this hour?" he went on.

"Yes, somewhat, sir. As is everyone."

"That is more than understandable. And you need always not be so diplomatic with me, though an admirable inclination it is, all the same."

"Yes, my lord."

His eyes were still not upon me, so I took the opportunity to continue my survey of the room. The wall to my left was taken up by a high bookshelf, filled end to end with volumes. Some of the neat spines were the full width of a man's palm, and others were slender as a child's finger; I was too anxious to notice a great deal more about them.

"You are fond of books?" Lord Aradîr was looking at me, now.

"Yes, my lord," I replied, turning back towards him. It was true; I had always enjoyed books. I was not particularly adept at reading, and found it a slow and frustrating affair, but I loved the smell of the leather bindings and the dry rustle of pages beneath my fingers on the scarce occasions when I had a book on hand. I admired the neat contrast between black ink and white-yellow paper, and the elegant rows and lines that the words made.

"That is well," he nodded approvingly. He laid the papers on his desk and clasped his hands on top of them. "You should know the Warden speaks highly of you. He has told me that you are a very intelligent girl, very diligent…and very obedient."

"That is…good to know, my lord," I replied. In my lap, my hands had begun to knot themselves into the folds of my smock.

"And, of course, that you are no poor healer," he went on. "You are like your mother in that respect."

"Thank you, sir."

He paused, then glanced down at his papers once more. "A pity for us all that she did not remain in the City, as well," he remarked softly.

"She would have stayed behind, my lord, had she not my brother and my cousin to care for."

"They must be young indeed, then."

"My brother is ten years old, sir, old enough to have stayed on as a message-lad if he wished. But my cousin is only seven, and they are closer to one another than any two brothers, and would not be separated. So both boys went to the coast." _To my mother's great relief_, I added silently. I wondered how they fared now; farther from peril than we were, no doubt, but also farther from home.

"'Twas good of her to spare one of her children, then."

I nodded stupidly; I could not tell whether he meant that she had spared her daughter for the service of the City, or that she had spared her son from certain death.

I remembered back to only two weeks before, though it seemed like years ago. Two weeks before, when Minas Tirith was bleeding itself out in rivers of people, all the maidens and children and the old ones who were headed for safer ground. When the Houses of Healing were full of talk about who would go and who would remain, especially after it was announced that the women might stay, too, if they so chose.

I would remain and aid my City, I had decided. Not because I had truly desired to stay, but because somehow I knew it might feel worse to leave. When I told my mother, there was some childish part of me that wanted her to fight me, that wished she would beg me to come with her, so that perhaps I might even be convinced to do so. But of course she did not beg me; I was no longer a little girl, after all, and could do as I pleased. She had nodded and told me she was proud of me. She had told me to be brave. Later she kissed me goodbye and let me go, and now I did not know what I would have done had the choice been mine all over again.

"And your father? Defending Gondor, undoubtedly?" Aradîr turned over a sheet of paper, which made a soft flicking noise. I swallowed. 

"Dead, my lord. Nine years ago."

"I am sorry."

"There is no need, sir."

Aradîr regarded me for a long moment, then nodded briskly. I wondered what he had summoned me here for; my body refused to relax in the chair. I fully expected that at any moment I should be accused, threatened, sentenced.

"As I recall, you work mainly in the south ward."

"North and south, my lord."

"That is well," he said. "And is there ever need for you in the surgery corridor?"

_Ah, so here it is…_

"Yes, my lord. On occasion."

"I see. And are there any surgeons who favor your work especially?"

"No, my lord. Not especially."

He made a soft noise of assent in his throat and looked down at his papers once more. I tried to keep still; I felt as though I had done something wrong. _Nothing at all_, I thought to myself. _You have done no wrong. Not yet, at the very least…_ I remembered the man lying in Valacar's surgery-room that day, and repressed a shudder at the nearness of the memory as it welled up in my throat.

"So you have aided many of them?"

"A few, sir."

"Valacar?" Lord Aradîr's tone was marvelously casual, as if this were merely the first surgeon's name he had plucked from the air, and nothing more.

"Yes…once or twice, my lord."

"He asked for you?"

I remembered Valacar's words: _Just protect yourself, if it comes to that._ But if Aradîr did not know _something_, he would not be asking me such pointed questions…

"His apprentice was ill, my lord. Valacar merely needed a second pair of hands for the day."

"And does Valacar conduct himself well?"

"I—I do not understand, my lord."

"He has never treated you in any way that was…untoward, has he?"

It was not an invalid question: some of the surgeons, steady as they were with their scalpels, were known to be a bit careless with their hands, especially where the young women of the Houses were concerned. Valacar, however, had never been one of these, and I found myself bridling at the very suggestion.

"Never, sir."

"A perfect gentleman, I suppose?" For the first time in our conversation, I detected an edge creep into Aradîr's voice. I half-expected to see his mouth curled into an elegant smirk; it was not, of course.

"Yes, my lord," I truthfully replied.

"That is well. And he has asked for you?" Aradîr's tone was still light, as if this were some small misapprehension that he needed my assistance in sorting out. But he would not have called a little healer-girl all the way to his offices for the correction of a simple misapprehension, would he?

"Yes, my lord. He asked for me."

He nodded and slowly pulled one of the papers from the stack, holding it up before him in two hands so that I could not see the markings on it.

"Know that I doubt not your skill, good lady, nor do I doubt the skills of _any_ of those in our Houses. But you are aware, are you not, that for a woman to attend at surgery is in direct violation of the Healer's Canon?"

Had I not been so startled, I might have laughed. "The _Canon_? My lord, those laws were written hundreds of years ere our time; they—"

"As were many of our laws, good lady." Aradîr's voice was soft and even. "And yet that is no less of a reason to cleave to them."

"But—" I began, but then thought better of it. _But we all break the Canon, now and again—healers, herbalists, surgeons and Warden_, I was about to say. And it was the truth. Everyone knew it. The Canon was a set of old and elegant rules, but Gondor had been at war for years; there were edges that had to be trimmed away, formalities that must be forgone, in times such as these. We looked upon the Canon as more of a symbol of our history than anything else. Our Warden knew this, for he was there with us every day, walking the aisles between the sickbeds. We all knew that there were things he chose not to see, mild transgressions on which he did not have time to remark; the times before the poppy rationing, for instance, in which the healers might administer a slight excess of the drug to a painfully dying soldier, so that he could drift off to sleep more easily, though he might not wake up again. It was one of the many small truths of the Houses that went unspoken, but stood all the same.

Aradîr gave a lift of his brow at my aborted objection before going on. "You were made to recite the Canon upon your induction as an apprentice, were you not?"

"Yes, my lord. All of us were."

"Recall you the passage concerning women in the Houses?"

I closed my eyes and remembered the hours I had spent with my mother as she helped me to memorize the Canon in full; it was a long collection of laws, but we were all made to learn it perfectly so that we could speak it for that one occasion. In the weeks before each yearly induction, it is not uncommon to hear the young boys and girls murmuring snatches of passages under their breath as they go about their errands. Laeron had had a terribly hard time learning his Canon, I remembered; Elloth, of course, had had its entirety committed to her memory from nearly her first hearing, and had not been shy about volunteering this fact whenever the subject arose.

"_And of those women who tend to the wounded and the infirm_…" I began slowly, the words coming back to me after these intervening years. "…_just as they shall not wield sword in war, neither shall they take a blade to the bodies of those who lie in their care, for their work shall be for the giving of life, and not for the wounding_."

I stopped and opened my eyes. Aradîr was staring at me with a faint smile on his face.

"We all carry knives," I protested. "All of us, my lord. 'Twould be near impossible to treat the battle-wounds without such things, even for the women."

"When you are making your rounds on the _wards_, yes?"

"Yes."

The expression on my face must have been concerned, indeed, for Aradîr gave a gentle laugh. "Be not so troubled, good healer. I am not blind to the necessities you face, though I am…how do your old women say, 'Neither healer nor…'"

"Neither healer nor surgeon, my lord," I murmured.

He smiled. "Yes, that is the old adage, I am told. Tell me, though…recall you the very next part of the Canon?"

I traced back over the words in my mind. "_…for their work shall be for the giving of life, and not for the wounding. They will withdraw_…" I went on. "_They will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work._"

"And so there are reasons that women may not become _surgeons_, you see."

"But sir, I was not—"

He put up a hand to stop me. "Please forgive me. It is not my intent to make you run through your lessons like a school-child, nor is it my intent to dictate how you should go about doing your work."

_Then what _is_ your intent?_ I thought.

"Understand that you have done nothing wrong," he continued. "I merely wish to make you realize that some of your superiors…some of your _surgeons_…might draw you into a position in which you are forced to go against our laws, even if it seems to be in the best interests of your patients." The wooden legs of his chair scraped the floor as he pushed back from his desk to stand and turn around and gaze out the window, arms crossed over his chest. "I have served this City as a statesman for many years, and one of the things I have learned is that breaches of…small rules can soon lead to violations of larger ones, and larger ones still." He turned around and looked at me once more. "And you must know, as well, that to be complicit to any such crimes renders one just as much at fault as if one had carried out the crime oneself. Perhaps even more so."

"Yes, my lord." In my lap, my palms were cold with sweat.

Lord Aradîr crossed over to where I sat, and, to my surprise, dropped to a crouch beside my chair so that our eyes were on the same level.

"You are not an ignorant girl," he whispered. "You do not seem so to me, nor are ignorant men and women permitted to become healers and surgeons. So there is no way you cannot see that Gondor is dying. That Minas Tirith is dying. And that it has been so for years, that it began before you were born."

My throat went dry.

"But even in our death we are strong," he went on. He was so close that I could feel his breath on the skin of my neck. "And that is because we have an order of things. We have the codes and the decrees of our Stewards and even of our Kings, that we may hold them and cleave to them as flesh cleaves to bone. Do you understand?"

I nodded.

"So you understand that I…that _we_ must not see this City fall into lawlessness, even in its ending. That we must not turn to such weakness, even in these final moments."

"Yes, my lord," I replied, my own voice barely above a whisper. Lord Aradîr stood up once more. I had to tilt my chin up in order to look at him.

"That is well. And if ever you should observe that _anyone_ in the Houses is engaging in any…larger breaches of Canon, you would inform the Warden, would you not?"

"I would, sir."

He went and sat behind the desk once more, and returned once more to the seemingly perpetual shuffling and re-shuffling of his papers. Suddenly my anxiety about this man's words were drowned in a surge of contempt. His hands were soft and dry, and he was never with us; he was not in the wards, wading through a sea of beds and bodies. He was not there with us, plunging his fingers into wound after wound until all thought disappeared; and so he could not make any judgments about what we might or might not do. He had no right to take me from the Houses, even if it were for less than an hour, to ask me questions that led nowhere and to make me repeat a Canon he might have just as easily looked up in one of his books. It was all time I might have spent helping the wounded men, or at the very least, moments that I might have spent curled up in a dead sleep in some dark room to the side.

"You have a good memory," he was saying to me.

"Thank you, my lord."

"Might you indulge me once more before I let you go? Tell me what the very beginning of the Healer's Canon says."

I nodded again, and tried to recall the first words.

"_I swear by the Valar and by all who preceded me in this craft that I will use this learning for the benefit of the wounded and the infirm. I will keep them from injustice and above all do them no harm._"

"Please, go on."

"_I will neither administer a deadly drug to anyone who asks for it, nor take measures to end a life before that time is fully due, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. In purity and devotion I will guard my life and my art._"

"You may stop there." Lord Aradîr was smiling once more. "Many thanks for your time, my good lady. You are dismissed."

----------

When I came back through the gardens, the soldier with the foot wound and the carving-knife was sitting against the wall once more.

"Hello, little one. Off to do more knife-work?"

I passed by without answering, my shoes crushing the soft grass.

"Well, then. Never can tell what pleases a lady, now can you?" he grinned.

I stopped and looked him in the eye.

"You don't frighten me," I said, and walked away swiftly, willing myself deaf to whatever it was he said next.

----------

In the south ward, Fíriel was folding the clean towels. I sat beside her and began to help. After three towels, I stopped and leaned my head on her shoulder and closed my eyes.

Fíriel finished folding the towel that was in her hands, then put her arm around me.

"Is anything wrong?"

I could feel the warmth through the cloth of her dress; she still smelled of chamomile. "I don't know."

"Will you tell me when you do?"

I nodded.

"All right," she said. She gave me a light kiss on the forehead. I rested there for a few moments more, and then I sat up again and we both went back to work.


	8. Uneasy Peace

A/N:

E.D.—Thanks! You're absolutely right; Tolkien often dwells on the glory and heroics of war, rather than the misery and the gritty little details.

Cubeleg—It's very easy to find interesting info on medicinal herbs on the web. The details about wounds were mostly gleaned from some valuable research articles on basic Middle-earth healing at the Henneth-Annun Story Archive. Good luck on those scenes in your own fic!

----------

When we had finished with the towels, Fíriel placed a basket's worth in my arms and told me to bring them to the south ward and the surgery corridor, and that after that I should go and rest.

The south ward was full, as it had been for the past several days, the Gondorian soldiers and the Rohirric cavalrymen perched and propped on the low, narrow beds. After the battle, the uninjured men would come to visit their friends. They trailed in and out of the wards between their shifts at feeding the funeral fires, and at all the other duties that had to be attended to in our half-crumbled City. The Houses were by far some of the cleanest places left in Minas Tirith, and there were women there, and the air within them was not nearly so foul as the air without. Therefore certain corners of the south ward had become unofficial gathering places for some of the companies. It was not unusual to pass loose clusters of soldiers, conversing and sharing their bread and meat, occasionally passing around a small flask. I liked the sound their talk made within the walls, their low voices mingling together like the constant noise of a fountain or a running stream.

I counted out stacks of towels to place on the small, squat wooden tables that stood among the beds at intervals. I exchanged the occasional greeting with this Rider or that Guardsman, for all of the healers had made the acquaintance of a great many men over this past week.

"Thank you, Miss," a man in ranger's garb said. His face was kindly and weather-worn.

"You're most welcome…Mablung, is it?"

"Aye. You see, Damrod?" He put a gentle elbow to the ribs of his friend, who was sitting beside him. "She remembers me."

"'Tis most likely because you're the greatest oaf she's ever met," said Damrod, without looking up.

----------

Before, I had never imagined that I could envy a soldier, but now at times I would watch them together like this and feel a strange longing. There was something about the way they spoke with one another, their movements as they clapped their friends on the back or clasped hands in salutation. Even the ones who would often quarrel, the ones who were not the fastest of friends within their unit, still seemed to carry that sort of easy, knowing closeness between them. I had always loved to sit and talk with the other girls in the Houses when we had time to spare, but it did not seem the same; I decided there must be a different sort of blessing conferred to those who had drawn and shed blood on the same field.

I was thinking of this when I came to the surgery corridor. I set a few towels outside of each room. When I came to the last in the row, I knocked on the door.

Valacar opened it and looked at me, one hand on the wooden frame. "Well, come in," he said.

I stepped inside and he looked quickly around before shutting the door behind me. The small room looked as it always did when Valacar was not at work on a patient; it was clean and orderly, all the edges of the tables squared to one another.

"I brought you some towels."

"As I can see. Thank you."

I gave the basket a small toss upwards, then caught it.

"But now they've all come unfolded." I sat down on a chair against the wall and placed the basket in front of me. "So I need to make them tidy again."

He stared at me for a moment. The first few ties at the neck of his coat had come undone. He snorted, then smiled. "As you wish."

I pulled out one of the white cloth squares and put it into my lap. It was a few minutes before I decided what I should say. For his part, Valacar was silent as well. He leaned against the opposite wall, arms folded over his chest.

"I'm not entirely sure what he wanted," I finally said. I remembered the endless stacks of papers, the books against the wall of the office, Aradîr's low whisper in my ear. "He was not forward with me. He wished to know if I had done any work in the surgery corridor, if I had ever aided you. And he said that it went against Canon for a woman to do surgery work."

Valacar raised his eyebrows. "Oh?"

"Though I don't think he is angry with me for that."

"No, I doubt he would be, in truth."

"And he kept going on about the Canon, and all of the laws. He said that the smaller violations could lead to the larger. I don't understand why he did not just ask me about…if he wanted, I mean…" I trailed off.

"And what do you think?" Valacar asked softly.

"Of what?"

"Do you think that it was the right thing for me to do?"

I looked down and ran my hands over the coarse cloth in my lap. I liked neither the question, nor the way in which he had asked it.

"Of course it was," I said quickly. I had never spoken of it with anyone—I had only played timidly about its edges. "It had to be. I—I mean, I saw him. I saw that man." I threw a glance towards the high surgery table. "'Tis a cursed thing, to let a man linger in such pain, is it not? Especially when his end is already certain." I closed my eyes. "I didn't like it," I continued, and my voice rose slightly. "I hated it. It made me ill to think of it, even after everything else. But it had to be done." I opened my eyes to look at Valacar. "It needed to be done, did it not?"

He shook his head slowly. "I don't know."

My stomach turned.

"What do you mean? You cannot do such a thing and not be sure of it." Valacar was one of our best surgeons; he had always seemed to know what to do. When the surgeons stood in the corridor to argue or debate some matter, they always heeded his words, even when his voice was the quietest. There was no sense in him asking me such a thing. I pulled the towel from my lap, tossed it back into the basket.

"And besides that," I went on, my tone softer now, "what can it mean, one more body? When there are yet so many lying on the field?"

"I suppose it means that one body carries the same weight as any other, and that we cannot always find a gentle way around things, and that those in our place must not make presumptions."

"What are you saying, then? What will you do?"

"I do not know. It was wrong of me to undertake such a thing while you were aiding at the surgery. It was thoughtless, and I wish no ill to come to you for it."

"'Twas but a brief talk I was called for, in the end." I paused, knotting and twisting my fingers into the loose folds of my smock. "But I still do not understand, Valacar; how could Lord Aradîr know of all this? It was during the fighting, was it not? Everyone was hard at work—and you were behind a closed door. And I—" I stopped in a panic of memory. Then I took a deep breath. "No. I said nothing," I finished, fairly sure of myself.

"But I sent you for the herbs."

"Oh." And then I remembered: Elloth's perfect records. Was it the job of the herbalists to record denials as well, now that the rationing was underway? "And I asked for them in your name."

Valacar nodded. "And soon after there was a corpse borne away from my part of the corridor."

A pause.

"But I still do not understand. Who would watch those things so well, especially when there is a battle at our doorstep?"

Valacar moved away from the wall and leaned over the table that stood between us, resting his weight on his elbows. "You seem like a good girl. You pay little heed to wagging tongues, I suppose?"

"Well… I…" The truth of the matter was that I enjoyed a good morsel of harmless gossip as much as any young lady, and there were often plenty to be had in the close space of the Houses. The reason that I was not of ill repute in this sense was that I did not simper and giggle like many of the other girls.

Valacar gave a weary smile. "That is well. I would have you know that grown men partake in their fair share of rumor as well."

Suddenly I recalled the barest shred of something—a few words, perhaps, that I had overheard nearly one year ago.

"You would be the next Warden, would you not?"

He nodded. "There has been talk, although I am not the only one under such consideration." He smiled again. "And our own Warden is yet quite hale, and I do not know if I should even like to inherit his position if ever it comes to that. I am no great lover of bureaucracy." His smile faded as he went on. "Such a thing does seem to mean that some men can nonetheless be watched more closely than others. That some cases can be handled less forwardly than others."

"Even in times of war?"

"Even in times of war. Perhaps even more than in the uneasy peace in which the City has dwelt for all these years."

"And what would become of you, Valacar? If…"

"Most likely I would be removed from the Houses. And perhaps there would be other consequences brought to bear; the ones for the taking of a life, outside of war."

I shook my head. "No."

His face softened. "But it may not come to that. I do not wish you to trouble yourself with this."

"I will, whether you wish it or not."

He crossed to the other side of the table to stand directly before me. "Take heart at this, then: the tides have turned, and Ioreth tells me that the King has come back to us."

I stared at him.

"'Tis often true that Ioreth prates more than is becoming," he went on, "but never in my memory has she spoken false."

"And what thinks the Lord Denethor of this?" I asked when my voice had returned.

It was his turn to stare.

"You do not know, then?"

"What?"

"The Steward is dead. There was a fire."

I bent my head and took a slow breath. Surely that could not be.

"The Lord Faramir will be Steward, now," Valacar continued. "And by all accounts he is a wise man."

"And a just man, as well?"

"Aye. A fair man."

"Then that is well, I suppose," I said, and any strength that was in my voice had long fled. I glanced up at Valacar once more. He looked tired and calm, as he always did. I could not see how he could be so serene. Before, speaking with him had never failed to settle my mind, if only just a little; now, our talk had hopelessly roiled my thoughts.

"Valacar, Laeron wants to go and fight!" I blurted suddenly. The memory of the apprentice in the kitchens had sprung to my mind unbidden.

"I know," Valacar sighed. "I believe that many of the young men in the Houses had such a desire. It was well for us all that the battle was ended before any had fully resolved to go."

"'Twould be folly."

"It might well be, but I can understand why Laeron and the others would wish to go. Though Laeron's parents sent him to be apprenticed to the Houses so that they would not have to send their son to war."

"And much good it did him. We have all been sent to war, in the end." I remembered Aradîr's words. _'Twas good of her to spare one of her children, then._

"We chose to stay, did we not?"

"Aye, that is true," I conceded. I paused once more, and then resumed: "And he's in love with Elloth, Valacar!"

"Oh." He considered this new revelation for a moment. "And is there anything you would like me to do about that?"

"I don't know, it's just—it's _Elloth_!"

"Well, she _is_ very pretty." He must have noted the look on my face, for he quickly added, "You're very pretty, too, of course." He paused, and stared at me. " i _You /i _ don't fancy him, do you?"

"_What? _Laeron? Valar, no."

"Well, then. You would do well not to add to your own troubles, my good lady."

I nodded quickly, embarrassed. Even at the end of it all I was still a rather silly girl, it seemed. "I should be going."

"One last thing: you should not tell anyone of the manner of the lord Steward's death. The Warden says that the news must not reach the lord Faramir's ears at the present time."

"Why not?"

"I assume it is because he has been gravely ill, and because he has more than enough to fill his thoughts in these days, even without word of his father's demise."

"I'll not tell anyone."

"I suppose you must keep secrets well enough—when it matters."

"I do."

Valacar nodded, satisfied. "You seem so. Quiet girls usually do. I believe I could tell that the first time I saw you, in fact."

"And when was that?"

"It must have been…nigh on twenty years ago, I suppose."

I folded my arms. "Don't tease me, Valacar. I would have been naught but a babe."

"So you were. I had just arrived in the City for my surgical apprenticeship, and your mother came with you to visit the others in the Houses. I remember she said that you were a very good and sweet child, though you did not smile as much as you might have. You sat in her arms very quietly and took in everything around you. I fancied that you looked like a wise little owl."

"That was a long time ago. Why would you recall a thing like that?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. Why do we remember some things and forget others?"

"A wise little owl," I repeated. "That is good to know, I suppose."

He smiled. "I am glad of it."

I stood up and made ready to leave. "Goodbye, Valacar. And thank you."

"Thanks to you, as well," he replied. "And do try to be at ease with this, if you can. You young ones must keep the hope for us all." He shut the door behind me and I left, clutching the empty basket.

----------

As I moved down the corridor that led to a wing of private rooms, the men seated with their backs against the wall threw me several longing looks. Or rather, they threw longing looks at the tray of food I was balancing in both hands. It was a good meal, to be sure; not an extravagant repast, but certainly much better than the plain bread and tough dried meat on which most of the men had been living for the past few weeks. As soon as the sons and daughters of nobles had come to the Houses, stuffed roasted game hen, good cheese, cured olives, and even a few delicately-crusted pastries had miraculously appeared in the kitchens.

"How nice of her, boys! She's brought us a proper supper."

"'Tis very sweet of you, missy, to remember the lowly warriors."

"This," I said, without breaking my stride, "is for the Lady Éowyn."

A chorus of groans and mock exhortations went up. It _did_ smell good.

"Ah, too good for the likes of us, I see!"

"Aye…playing lady's-maid to the Wraithbane, she is."

Lady's-maid, indeed, I thought.

"You will take the Lady her midday meal, and you will sit with her and wait on her until she is finished or dismisses you," the Warden had said to me earlier. I immediately opened my mouth to protest: I was a healer, after all, and not a maidservant—this was a distinction that the girls of the Houses took quite seriously. But the Warden did not look as though he was in any mood to debate this matter, and besides that, I realized that I was intrigued at the prospect of finally seeing the storied woman up close. So I had swallowed my objections and gone to fetch the food.

Now I tapped at the door with the toe of my shoe. The voice from within bade me enter, and I shouldered the door open and went inside.

"My lady," I said, and dropped a curtsey.

The tales that had been going around the Houses were numerous, and some were more fanciful than others. So perhaps I had expected to see some wild-woman with beads and feathers woven through straw-colored hair; or perhaps I fancied I would see some dark-eyed lady of death, swathed in robes of crimson and black.

I saw neither, however. The woman by the window stood slender and tall in a tidy white gown. Her fair hair hung loose down her back, shining dully in the muted slats of light that streamed through the glass. When she turned around I saw that her face was pale, and very, very pretty. I was reminded for a moment of the statue of the solemn young maiden I had seen in the gardens.

I carefully set the tray on the small table beside the bed. The fine covers looked barely disturbed. I cleared my throat nervously.

"With all respect, my lady, the Warden has said that you are to be abed as much as possible," I ventured.

She nodded slowly, but did not move. "I doubt not that that is what he said." Her accent was not so pronounced as those of many of the other Rohirrim, but there was yet a low, insistent thread of it running through her voice. No matter what else each of the different tales had said, they had all agreed that she was formidable.

I looked at her, and then I looked at the bed and at the food. I lifted the tray from the small bedside stand and placed it upon the regular table towards the center of the room. I pulled out the chair.

She nodded to me. "Thank you."

----------

Even today, people still ask me now and then what it was like to attend to the Lady of Rohan, and so soon after the Battle of the Pelennor. I always begin by telling them that she was a very poor eater in those days, and they swiftly lose interest.

It was true, nonetheless: I would watch her as she picked at her meals in disinterested silence, and marveled at how one with such a bad appetite could possibly have had the strength to ride to battle, let alone perform any great deeds upon arrival there. And then in all fairness I would remember that there had been many hours in these past days in which my own stomach had been empty, and yet I would sooner have died than made myself take a bite of food. In those hours it would be all torn skin, cracked bones, the warm iron flavor of blood.

I like to think that we were perhaps companionable. I was sent to her room with her meals many times over the next several days; while I was certain that while she had not requested my return, at the very least she did not find me objectionable. I believe that we were all little more than shadows to her at that time. She did not speak to me much, nor I to her. Sometimes she would ask me a question about the Houses or the City, and I would reply as best I could. Though she was nothing if not mirthless, she still seemed to possess an odd sort of humor, which occasionally bared itself in sharp, dry splinters.

Once she asked me if there were a great many ladies working here.

There were a fair few, I replied. Though not so many as before the Siege.

"I suppose I have met several of them," she said. Then there was a long pause. "You do not say a great deal," she told me.

"I could speak more, if my lady wishes."

She gazed out the window for a moment before looking back at me. "'Twas a compliment."

----------

On that first day with Éowyn, I returned the supper tray to the kitchens and walked back through the north ward. Beren was standing near a corner, talking to two other soldiers who wore the same dark livery as he did. Their faces were quite different from one another, save that they shared that peculiar sternness of countenance that seemed to attach itself to all of our menfolk from the age of fifteen or so; and yet at the same time they seemed to me as alike as three brothers. Beren saw me staring at him, and I looked away reflexively.

But a moment later he was at my side. "Hello again," he said.

"Hello. Are those your friends?"

"Aye."

"And how do they fare?"

"Well enough, I think. 'Tis good of you to ask."

"It is my business to ask." I inclined my head slightly to one side. He watched me with raised eyebrows.

"Then I will not praise you so if 'tis merely your job. After all," he went on lightly, "my uncle oft says that to feed a woman too much praise is like feeding a mare too many oats—it makes her spoiled and useless, you see." He smiled at me. I opened my mouth, but then he continued: "I think that you should take a walk with me."

"Why don't you find a mare? Perhaps she would be better company for you."

It took him a moment to recover. "I looked for one," he finally said, smiling once more, "but the stables were empty."

"Well, that's a terrible pity. She would have found your conversation far more charming."

He laughed, put his hands up to signal a truce. "Very well, then. You need not forgive me if you do not wish to. But you should come and take a walk with me."

I considered him for a moment, then nodded curtly. "A short one."

"Aye, and not in the gardens, since you insist you dislike them so."

"I never said that."

"Of course not."

We left the Houses and walked slowly round the Sixth Circle. I kept my arms folded across my chest. Our dragging feet were in marked contrast to the men and women who moved about briskly on some piece of business or other. We stayed close to the inside edge of the Circle, but here and there my gaze was drawn briefly outward and downward and a glimpse of the ruined Pelennor filled the corner of my eye. Perhaps it had been a mistake to go out, I thought, for the lightness of our previous talk seemed to drain from us with each step.

"May I ask you something, Beren?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever killed a man?"

He nodded, and his face was blank. "Aye, some. I once kept a sure count of all the foes I had felled, but I no longer care to do so. To slay a man is far more loathsome than slaying orcs, I think, but such was the way of the battles." He paused and looked at me. "Does that trouble you?"

"I don't know. It should not, I suppose." I cleared my throat. "For I am scarce more a virgin than you, when it comes to it."

I watched as his expression turned to one of utter shock, and he stared at me for a moment. Then he laughed, for he understood: I was not speaking of love and maidenhood, but of carnage and blood. When the men talked of being a virgin, they spoke not of lying with women, but of the difference between those who had not yet been to battle and kept company with death, and those who had.

"True that may be," he murmured, still smiling. "True that may be. The folk of the Houses keep a grim station, indeed." Then he grew grave. "A woeful day it is for our City, when our women speak as if they too are at war."

"We are," I said. "But unlike to you, our lives have not yet been in close peril, for our men have done well in keeping our foes at bay."

"Rohan has done well, you mean," he sighed. "And the men of the North, and the dead oathbreakers. Woeful, too, is the day when Gondor cannot defend herself by her own hand alone."

"But joyful is the day that she finds her friends in her greatest hour of need, Beren!" I said. "You speak as though any fault lies with you. None of this is your doing."

"I know," he said, and stopped walking: we had come to the eastern side of the Circle. We both fell silent as we gazed at the shadow that yet glowered in the distance, blurring the line of the horizon. Still far off, and yet so near. On an impulse, I stepped away from Beren and moved forward to the battlements. I stood there and gripped the railing with both hands, and the white stone was smooth and cool beneath my fingers. Another moment, and Beren was beside me once more. We were silent for a time, both of us staring East.

"I hate it," he finally said. "To look upon it is to hate it, and yet it has always been there, as long as I can remember." He shook his head.

"Ioreth once told me," I said quietly, "that those people who have lived all their lives in the City, those who have been children here, are a peculiar sort. That it comes from growing up beneath the Shadow, so that we are like animals whose eyes are shaped to the darkness, and that we cannot abide too much light at once."

"Think you that that is the truth?" Beren asked.

"I cannot say." I looked at him and smiled. "I do not think that _I_ am peculiar, of course. And 'tis true that Ioreth is different—she is from Lossarnach—but it could be that she is different from all the folk there, as well, for Ioreth is Ioreth. And Lady Éowyn and the Rohirrim are different from us, too, but they are simply from another land with other ways, and no better and no worse, I think. And Valacar…" I trailed off for a moment, and found myself staring in the direction of Mordor again.

"Who is Valacar?" Beren asked.

"He's a surgeon. From Amroth. And he is different, too. He looks at things in a different way." I sighed and braced my weight against the railing. Beren was watching me. "And he does not hold the City very close to his heart, I think."

"Nor should he, if Minas Tirith be not his home."

"No. He should not have to, I suppose."

I turned and leaned back against the stone so that I could face Beren. He was standing straight-backed and silent, this young soldier. He stared out to the East, as if trying to fathom the distance between himself and the Black Lands. I remembered what Valacar had said to me, about the young ones keeping up the hope. For a moment I was sorely tempted to tell Beren everything: about Valacar and Aradîr, and Laeron, and the dead man, and the wounded soldier with his eerie little wooden figures, and the way in which the only Steward we had ever known had passed away, taken by the flames. Things I might not have even told to my mother, had she been here.

Instead I held my tongue.

"I think that Ioreth is right," Beren said.

"Oh?"

"But only part of the way," he continued. "We may have grown so that our eyes are shaped to darkness, but this has only made us to seek light more fervently." He smiled. "So we are peculiar, after all."

His eyes were kind, but for some reason I looked away from them and turned back towards Mordor and the depthless murk that lay there. _None of this is your doing_, I had said to him. Nor was it mine, nor any of ours.

"It is out of our hands," I said, and shook my head. I did not know whether I was speaking more to Beren or to myself. "I need—"

"I know," he finished for me. "You need to go back to work."

I nodded and left it at that.

"Very well," he sighed. "So do I." He turned to go, and I followed after.


	9. Vigil

"Don't touch that," Elloth said as I leaned in to examine an odd-looking root upon the work-bench. At times the dispensary smelled like an entire garden dried and pressed into one room, sweet dark herbs and bitter pale tubers and sharp spices all crushed together in thick confusion. It made my eyes water.

"Why not?"

"Because," she said, carefully turning her mortar in her hand, "if you touch it, you'll die. And what's worse," she added, grinding the instrument harder for emphasis, "you'll have a horrid case of boils."

I considered this statement for a moment. "I do not think I believe you," I replied, although I realized that I had placed my left hand safely in the pocket of my smock. My right hand was beginning to ache from the weight of the full water-pail I clutched

"As you will," she said, with a brief glance at me.

I set the pail down beside the bench, and the movement sent a gentle ripple out from the center. Small things held my eye these days, strange though it might seem. "There is your water," I said.

"Thank you," she said. "And who was that young man with whom you were walking today?" she asked lightly, just as I was turning to leave.

"A soldier," I said, wiping my hands on the front of my smock. "I tended to a friend of his."

Elloth nodded, looked thoughtful for a moment. "Does he like you, then?"

"I don't know," I shrugged, although it _had_ occurred to me earlier that young men were not inclined to ask young women whom they disliked to accompany them on walks.

"And what is his name?"

I gave a weary sigh. "Beren."

"Beren," she repeated. "Woe betides a woman who loves a man named 'Beren,'" she added in a solemn voice.

"Valar, Elloth! It was a walk. I don't _love_ him—or at least I should hope not. I would think that that sort of thing takes a month, at the very least."

Elloth inclined her head prettily to one side and made a noise that sounded like _hm_.

"How often do you think about such things, anyhow?" I asked.

"As often as I do not care to think of other things," she replied tersely. I stared at her from the doorway. In the dim light her slender hands were pale against the dark leaves she was crushing in the pestle.

"Well," I said. "Fíriel is waiting on me."

"I have been thinking about her, too."

"Oh?"

She nodded. "Does she ever seem lonely, to you?"

"No." I folded my arms over my chest. It had never occurred to me—Fíriel was always moving to fill the empty spaces and to smooth the rough edges of things. "No more lonely than any of the rest of us."

"Between the two of us," she said in a loud whisper, glancing up at me, "I always thought that she should marry Valacar. They would be well-suited."

I raised my eyebrows and opened my mouth to object, as was my habit whenever Elloth took to making such pronouncements. But I found that this time, I found that I could not disagree with my usual virulence.

"Well," said another voice. I turned and realized that Fíriel had appeared beside me in the doorway. Her own arms were folded; her mouth was unsmiling but her eyes were not unamused. "_That_ would certainly be interesting."

But of that she said no more, as both Elloth and I were far too embarrassed to further press the subject.

I was tired. Mostly I felt chilled, and there was a heaviness behind my eyes. At times my stomach was knotted with worry, but at other times the world would fade into a grey blur and I found that I little cared about what was happening within or without our walls. The news and the rumors, both sensible and wild, persisted in every corner of the Sixth Circle, from the wide doorways of the statesmen's offices down to the dead-end cobblestone alleys where the message-lads played in their free moments. You could no more avoid hearing them than you could avoid breathing the air. But at times I yet found myself deaf to their meanings, letting the words slide away from me like water from stone.

I was tired, and I was forgetting. It no longer seemed strange to me that the streets and the corridors were dotted with soldiers only, not tradesmen or apprentices, serving-maids or vendors. It no longer seemed strange to lie down in a room that was close and crowded with women every night, instead of my bed in my own house. Many a time when I ached for sleep, my muscles were wound too tightly beneath my skin and I could not make myself be at ease in the dark. I would rest stretched out on the thin pallet and listen to the breathing of the others, and only then would the tales of the day return to me, and I would wonder, in my helpless waking, what was to become of us all.

I no longer found it remarkable to smell the smoke of the funeral-fires every time I stepped outside, nor to turn a corner in the Houses and find a new row of shrouded corpses.

And I was no longer frightened by the hollow windows of the empty houses that lined the echoing streets. I walked by indifferently, and let them stare as they might.

Elloth's dispensary records were a busy grid of marks and tallies; I thought of a map of tiny rooms, crowded with people. Rooms and beds and tables, row on row—it made me weary even to think of it.

She noticed me staring. "Are you looking for something?"

"Suppose I asked you for something, but you had no more left, or…"

"Yes, yes," she replied with a wave of her hand. "We take down everything. All of the requests. The herb-master wants precise tallies, so that we know how much of everything we need to plant, or purchase, or…"

"And what if you had it, but you refused me? Because it was the sort of thing that would kill me and give me boils," I added.

"We take down everything," Elloth repeated. "Why?"

"No reason," I murmured. I thanked her and she watched me as I left.

And then there were the men who lingered in their dying. The Siege was over and the healers were no longer needed in all places at once. I had to teach myself how to keep vigil at bedsides once more, to wait in the company of waning heartbeats and paling skin. At times my temples ached and I would reach up and slowly slip the cloth from my head and sit with my hair uncovered, though I was not supposed to.

"'Tis women's work," Ioreth said to me once in those days. "For everyone is brought into the world by a woman, you see, and so 'tis only proper that a woman should see them out, when she may. Or that was what my mother in Lossarnach said to me, at least, many years ago. But you know about these things, I should reckon, for you are a clever girl." She smiled, and her wrinkled hand was soft against my face when she patted my cheek. She had been all the same throughout all of this, not leached sober and quiet like many of us.

She left me. The man lying in the bed behind me groaned, and I turned to tend to him.

"Does it ever grow dull, when you do naught but sit like that?" Laeron asked me. We were in the kitchens again, and I was waiting for Lady Éowyn's meal. Laeron was rolling an apple back and forth on the table before him, pushing it between his hands. At the sudden ending of the Siege he had seemed disappointed, though mostly relieved and dazedly astonished as all the rest of us were.

"I like to sit," I replied. "'Tis good to have a rest now and then."

"Well, what do you think about?" he said.

"My mother said that if someone is dying, I ought to think about where he is from, and how he might have lived, and his family, as well." I remembered the days when I was younger and she had taken me by the hand and guided me. _And here is the place where you now must be, dear one_. "She said that no one should pass without being thought of."

"Does that take a long time, then? Thinking of all those things?" He tossed the fruit up with one hand, caught it, tossed it again.

I shrugged and leaned against the door-frame. My feet were sore. "I don't do it very often, anymore. It feels too much like inventing stories to myself."

He blinked. "There is nothing wrong with that." The apple rose and descended once more.

I held my hands out, palms open. Laeron stared at me for a moment, then threw the apple in my direction.

"Why aren't you with Valacar?" I asked as I caught it.

"He said that things are going slowly today and that I would do well not to expose myself to unnecessary tedium, because I am but nineteen years old and will have more than ample opportunity for such things when I am older." I tossed the apple back to him. He tried to catch it one-handed, then fumbled and closed both of his palms around it.

"That sounds like him."

"Aye," Laeron nodded, cleared his throat. "Although I suspect it might be more that he does not like the way I arrange his instruments for him."

"Did he say as much?"

"No. But I can tell. Sometimes he goes and fixes them after I am through."

"Is he good to you, Laeron?"

"Aye." He took a bite out of the apple, chewed slowly. "He is. Though he has been quiet, lately. More than is usual, I mean." He looked around, and said in a lower voice, "And not a word about the dealings with Aradîr, or anything of the sort. Though that is no business of mine, I suppose." He shook his head.

I looked at my feet.

"Sometimes," he went on, "when I am with someone, and they do not speak, it puts me ill at ease. As if _I_ should speak, even if I haven't got a thing to say. But I do not mind so much when Valacar is quiet. Often I wish he would _tell_ me more, I mean; but he has a good way of being silent."

"Like Fíriel," I put in, relieved that the subject had not lingered on the Master of the Houses.

He nodded. "Yes, like her, I suppose. A great deal, actually…"

"Elloth said—" I began with a roll of my eyes, then paused and looked around quickly. Laeron's attention had risen visibly at the mention of the name. "She said she thought them suited to one another."

His eyebrows rose slightly and he made a noise that sounded like _hm_. "Well, Fíriel hasn't a husband, has she?"

"No, she hasn't. And Valacar has not got a wife, I suppose?"

"He's never spoken to me of one." He paused, took another bite of his apple. "Although I am told that some of the surgeons never speak of their wives or their children when they are at the tables and the wards. So that they can keep them apart from…well…" he trailed off, swallowed.

I nodded. To labor in the Houses was to be able to conceal some things, in a way, or at least to reveal only what you chose. Maidens, wives, and widows alike all kept their heads covered, as was the proper and modest thing for ladies who worked in such a place. Men and women who had wedding rings wore them on chains about their necks, under their clothes, so as not to lose them or sully them in the blood and the mire. My mother kept up this practice, even after my father had died. When she was troubled or startled, her hand would go briefly to the spot at her chest where the small bands rested beneath the cloth of her dress.

"But then—" Laeron began, then stopped abruptly.

"Then?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Nothing. It's just—he's said some things, once or twice, and I thought perhaps—" He broke off once more, and this time his gaze went to the space in the door beside me.

I looked to where his eyes were, afraid that one of the subjects of my talk had overheard me for the second time that day, but instead I received a greater surprise.

"Hello, Master Meriadoc," Laeron said. The _perian_ standing next to me glanced up at me with large eyes, smiling uncertainly. He barely came up to my waist. Pale bandages were apparent beneath his thin shirt, but the color in his cheeks was good. I had glimpsed the small creature now and then over the past few days, and every time I had blinked in bemusement; I was too weary to manage genuine amazement. "This is Master Meriadoc, come to us of late from the North," Laeron said for my benefit. I nodded.

"Hullo, Master Laeron," replied Master Meriadoc. I had half-expected his voice to be that of a child's, but it had the same timbre of any young man's. "Pleased to meet you, lady," he said to me.

"And you," I said. I dropped a curtsey and introduced myself. He was not wearing any shoes, I noticed. He moved between me and Laeron, leaning against the bench and casually palming a piece of bread from the tabletop with an ease that bespoke his familiarity with our kitchens, or perhaps with kitchens in general.

"I was wondering…" he began, looking first at Laeron, and then at me. "Your Warden said…that it might be good for me to sit with the Lady Éowyn while she takes her supper?"

Laeron and I exchanged glances. "Of course," I said. "Come with me in just a moment, and we will go to her together."

"Be sure to ask him about the Shire," Laeron smiled to me as one of the other girls put a full tray of food in my hands. He took another bite of his apple and looked at the _perian_ once more. "You'll tell her about the Shire, won't you?"

Later, the songs and the stories would emerge from the fresh rubble of the War, about the journeys of the Halflings, and all their trials and their perils. We knew already of the one who had sworn himself to the service of the Tower, and of this kinsman of his who had ridden with the Rohirrim and met the Black Captain on the field. Lady Éowyn had enquired of his wellbeing no few times, but I could never offer her an adequate answer; now I was pleased that I could bring him to her in the flesh.

Later, the songs and the stories would tell us all we wished to know and more, but for now Master Meriadoc simply walked beside me and told me of some of the green places of the world. In the narrow parts of the corridor his sleeve would sometimes brush against my skirts. His step was slow from his recent hurts, and as we walked to the wing of private rooms I had ample time to hear of the warm, busy holes his countrymen built in the ground, the gardens and Bywater and the river they called the Brandywine. I could almost see Buckland, myself, or at least I thought I could. He spoke of the place as the weary men were wont to speak of sleep, and as the lonely men spoke of absent children and wives.

"That sounds lovely," I said. "The fields and forests especially, I think."

He nodded, craned his neck to look up at me. "That is what many of your people say. You all seem to be in terrible want of trees and grass and things."

"Aye," I laughed. "A terrible want. But please, forgive me. I am sure you must weary of telling the same tale to all of us, here."

"No." He shook his curly head. "No, I do not mind it at all."

He spoke, too, of his young cousin Peregrin, and of another cousin and his servant who had journeyed with them for a ways. But of those last two he said little.

I had planned to sit with the Lady Éowyn and wait on her as I usually did, but then I watched her and the Halfling greet one another in the quiet chamber. She was at first reserved, and he seemed wary and shy. But he went and sat on the edge of her bed and they spoke as I arranged the food upon the table, and there seemed to pass between them something very like that which passed between the soldiers in the wards. A peculiar sort of understanding. I decided to let them alone, and I shut the door behind me and returned to the corridor.

I tended to one of the black-tagged men. Part of his face had been wrecked; part of his shoulder was gone. I did not know how he was yet alive.

I was thinking back to my talk with Laeron. As I changed the bandages over the oozing flesh, I leaned in to whisper to the man that the King was returned to us. I whispered to him that his struggle had not been in vain. I was close and I could smell him; my breath stirred what was left of his hair. Outside, the sky was gray once again, and the air was heavy.

I tied off the last of the bandages. I did not know if he had heard me; perhaps I was grown still more selfish, I thought, and my murmurings were more for my own benefit than for his.

"You would not rob him of that, then?" said a quiet voice behind me after I had gotten up from my crouch. I turned around and started. It was the wounded soldier, standing now; he leaned easily against the wall, carving knife once more in his right hand. Perhaps he slept clutching it, as well, I thought. In his left hand was another blunt scrap of wood. His eyelids were heavy but the glare beneath them was now sharp. "Rob him of his last hours, no matter how cruel they be?"

I wiped my hands slowly on the front of my smock, pressed them against the cloth. "What do you mean?"

"No, of course you would not," he went on, unheeding of my query. Again, that private, self-satisfied smirk. "There are too many others, about, are there not? Someone might see."

"This is no concern of mine, sir. Now, my business lies elsewhere…" I had half-turned to go when he lunged forward and seized me by the arm. His grip was tight. I gasped; his breath was slow and warm at my neck.

Just as quickly, he released me, smiling.

"You mind your hands, sir!" I hissed, hoping that my words were sharp enough to mask any shaking in my voice. I rubbed my arm where he had clutched at me. The man on the bed beside us stirred gently and made a low moaning noise in what remained of his throat.

"Nay, little one. 'Tis you who would do best to mind yours." The soldier paused and casually repositioned his knife in his fingers, played the edge lightly about the pale wood. "And that surgeon," he added. "He has got a look about him, you know. That is not a thing for one time only—'tis far easier than you would think."

"What do _you_ know of it?" I demanded, regretting the question as soon as it left my lips.

He regarded me. The smile had not left his face. "Of what?" he said softly. "Of death?" The knife made a quick jab into the wood, then twisted slightly. "Much more than the likes of you, I should wager. Much more than you." All the time his gaze was on me, but as he spoke he slid the blade lower and closed his left hand into a fist, let the lines of blood bloom around the wood, in the spaces between his mottled fingers. He leaned forward again and I nearly jumped, but this time he only whispered in my ear.

The gray-haired captain who had told us to check the bodies on the Second Circle for letters had been visiting some of his wounded men in the ward, but now he sat alone on an unoccupied bed in the far corner, turning a piece of parchment in his hands, angling it towards the light. He stopped and folded the scrap when I came and stood before him.

"That man, sir," I said to him, "that man is not well. He will do himself harm." _And perhaps others, besides_, I added silently. My heart was beating quickly and painfully.

The captain glanced up, over my shoulder. "There, against the wall. Over at the end, in the dark jacket," I said. I did not look behind me.

"And why think you this, good lady?"

"I—he spoke to me, just now, and his words seemed most unsettling, and—"

"_Valar_," the captain murmured, still gazing beyond me. "I thought them all lost."

"What, sir?"

"The markings on his shirt—that is the livery of the eastern river company, if I am not mistaken," he marveled. "It was their position that took the greatest losses when the forts fell. My men told me that few or none had escaped with their lives, that they were all but swept away. Slaughtered. The numbers of the Enemy were too great." He looked at me once more, and his face was weary and grave. "Men like that," he said, "rarely fail to say things that are most unsettling, good lady. They are best left to themselves, at least for a time."

The soldier, left hand bright with iron-smelling blood, had leaned in close to me once more, leaned in close to whisper. _And yet, little one, you still do well to confide in men who are soon to be no more_.


	10. Rain

I don't care where you live; you cannot know what rain sounds like until you have come to Minas Tirith. It batters against the stone walls and the windows like a hail of pebbles, rattling the rooftops with an insistent roar. It gathers into streams and goes whispering through the old gutters, rising and pooling in the cracks between the flagstones—there is no earth into which it can sink. After a rainfall, the City can stay grey and damp for days on end, like a sodden garment left out in the sun.

There were murmurs of the lingering threat in the East, a Captains' council, and the man who had come to Minas Tirith claiming kingship. Depending upon where you worked and the sharpness of your ears, you might have had any number of rumors and speculations from which to choose. I heard some of the younger surgeons talking about a lull, perhaps a lasting peace. Ioreth would tell anyone whom she presumed would listen (that is, anyone within earshot) about the new King and the strength of his line, the power of his summonings. Most of the soldiers and riders and guardsmen in the City had drawn themselves back into their own private knots, speaking of the prospect for a new battle, guessing at the numbers of men that could be mustered and the strength remaining within Mordor. The mood seemed to go from grim to hopeful to grim again in the space of a few moments, and so when the rain began, the less confident took it as a sign that things would not go well.

"None of them know what they're talking about," Fíriel said. She made a clucking noise with her tongue, a thing she had once told me she tried not to do, as it made her sound like an old wife.

"What do you think is going to happen?" I asked. As I still felt myself to be on uncertain ground with her after the exchange in the dispensary, I refrained from mentioning the cluck.

"I don't know. I don't see any use in trying to guess at such things."

"Well, you must—at least a small bit. Everyone does."

She was quiet for a moment and she closed her eyes. I listened to the assault of water on the high roofs above us. The grey storm clouds had none of the heavy malice that had accompanied the murk on that dawnless day of the Siege.

"I think that something has got to happen soon. Either we go out, or they come to us once more. Things cannot stay this way." She paused. "But Ioreth also tells me that this man—this king—is a healer, like us. And that is certainly encouraging." She smiled, but then she looked at me again and stopped. "Are you all right?"

"Yes."

"Really?"

"Yes. I'm just tired."

"As are we all," she sighed, and she reached over to straighten the cloth on my head. It had made itself crooked again.

* * *

The injured soldier's words would not leave me. They rung in my ears and turned in my stomach. I went to look for Valacar.

"Not here," Laeron told me when I asked him.

"Where is he? I'd like to speak with him."

"Meeting with the Warden, I believe. Look, what is this all about?"

"It—" I stopped and shook my head. I wanted to tell him. I wanted to tell _someone_. I now had secrets wrapped in secrets, and I could not tease out one piece without unraveling all of it at once. "I think—I think one of the men might be angry with him."

"_Angry_ with him? Why?"

"I don't know. He seems a bit—" I touched a hand to my head. "Not all right."

"Did he say anything, that might…"

"He spoke to me, and he said…" I could feel the threads coming apart in my hands even as I went on. "He said that I did well to speak to those who would soon be no more."

Laeron folded his arms. "But isn't that what you were doing? Tending to the dying men?"

"Well, I was, but the _way_ he said it, Laeron…"

"How did he say it, then?"

"He just sort of—he whispered it. In my ear. But before that, he clutched at me." I touched my arm. "Pulled me in. Trying to frighten me, I suppose."

"If he was trying to frighten _you_, why are you afraid for Valacar?" I opened my mouth, but Laeron continued: "Which of the men is this, anyway? Do you want someone to go and talk to him for you?"

"No. That's all right—"

"Because that's not a proper way to speak to a young lady, you know. And a healer, besides."

"It's all right, Laeron. Thank you." I turned to go, hiding a smile.

"Wait," he said. "Do you think you might—could you stay, for a while? I don't know when Valacar will be back, and I—well, I've never worked by myself before."

"Of course," I nodded. "Of course I'll stay."

* * *

That was the day I saw the slower-paid wages of the battle. The men with rotted wounds that had crept slowly up their arms and legs—bandages had to be peeled off, and blackness pared away so that the sickness would not take them whole.

I had learned, in my own strange way, to appreciate amputations—I suspect that many of us did. Certainly they were cleaner—if any surgery can truly be called cleaner than another—than the chest-wounds and the stomach-wounds. It was clear, most of the time: go through the flesh, then through the bone with the large saw, then the flesh again. Stitch it all closed, and you know that you are finished.

I had never seen Laeron work before. He was different. When the scalpel was in his hand, all the fidgeting and the nervous shifting subsided. Even his voice took on a slightly different pitch, as if he was no longer searching for the direction in which his words would go. He would do the final inspections and pronouncements before we began: right arm below the elbow, left leg below the knee. Right leg, above the knee.

These men would be all right, I thought. Their wounds would heal. They would live. And maybe Laeron was right about my worries: perhaps it was nothing. It all sounded so silly and formless, anyway, when I had tried to put it all into words. Perhaps everything would be fine.

We did four or five operations in a row. My arms and hands ached. I stood at the washbasin and scrubbed blood from beneath my fingernails. Laeron sat in the chair against the wall, his head tilted back.

"I don't like the way they move them in and out," he said.

"What?" I shook water from my hands.

"They just bring them in one at a time, and then they get taken away when it's done. I suppose it makes me feel like a butcher."

"Well, you're a fine butcher, then."

He smiled, and then he cleared his throat. "The Warden once told me that they used to do it all out in the open, out on the north ward. That might have been better, I guess. Just leave them lying in one place."

"Why did they change it?"

"Probably because…well, it would have been hard on the others. The screaming, I suppose. The sight of everything. So now we work in these little rooms, when we are able."

There was a pause, and I listened through the silence.

"It's still raining," I said.

"Is it?"

"Listen."

He closed his eyes, and then he nodded. "It must be dreadful on the lower circles." He was quiet, and then he opened his eyes and stared at me.

"It doesn't make any sense."

"What?"

"Why would one of the men take up a grudge against a healer?"

I shook my head. "He might…perhaps he might not understand everything. So—perhaps the men we worked on today might be angry at us, for a little while. We took something from them, after all."

I shook the water from my hands; I did not dry them on the front of my smock because the cloth was already too filthy from the day's work. Laeron got up and walked over to the washstand, splashing water up to his forearms.

"What happened?" he asked. He turned around to look at me, and when I was silent he stared back into the basin. "I'm not stupid, believe it or not."

"Laeron, I—"

"You what? Can't quite trust me, I suppose?" He was scrubbing very hard, one finger at a time, as all the surgeons did.

"Laeron—"

"Because I trust you," he said. "And Valacar," he added quietly, with a little snort. "Even though he never tells me anything."

I went and stood next to him, and he still did not look at me.

"It's not a choice of mine, Laeron. Whether or not I—but I _do_ trust you."

He sighed, and he did not speak again until he was finished washing his hands.

"Whatever it is, it must be nothing, indeed, compared to—well, compared to everything else." He shook his head.

"Most things are."

* * *

Because there was no one else to remove them, we gathered the soiled towels into baskets and carried them to the laundry. In the corridor next to the north ward we passed Elloth, who gave us a nod. 

When she was gone, Laeron glared at me suddenly.

"And did you tell Valacar that I liked Elloth?"

"No." He continued to stare at me over the pile of bloody cloths. "Maybe. I don't remember."

"Because I don't, you know."

"All right."

"Probably too good for me, anyway," he muttered.

"No!" I said, laughing for what felt like the first time in days. "More the opposite, I should think."

Laeron blushed the same shade as the towels, and then he mumbled something I could not make out.

We were silent as we walked past the north ward. The men were still clustered everywhere, standing in the aisles and resting against the walls, voices raised to compete with the added murmur of the rain. The wounded soldier was standing by an entryway on the opposite side of the room. I tried to look away, but before I could he caught my eye and held it. I started, and stared down into my basket.

"Are you all right?" Laeron asked me.

"Fine," I murmured. My stomach hurt. "I'm just fine."

* * *

For once, the thick steam of the laundry room felt good. We set down our towels, and then I pulled my smock over my head and set it on the pile. For all the hours I had spent stripping pieces of mail and armor from dead and wounded men, I was still convinced that a dirty smock was the heaviest garment in the world.

Laeron watched me and wiped his brow, raked a hand through his hair. He looked around at the huge tubs and wringers with mild curiosity.

"Never been here before, then?" I asked him.

"I have, but not for years." He leaned one shoulder against the pale wall and rubbed his eyes. Then he laughed.

"Is something funny?"

"I was—no, I was just thinking. I heard something strange, today."

"Oh?"

"I was looking in on Lord Tarnion's son—he took a spear to the side while he was on the walls, you see. He was running a fever this morning and Tarnion came to visit. The man's been in a bad way ever since they brought his son back up from the fighting. And the son was sleeping well, but Tarnion was terribly nervous. He reminded me," Laeron paused, then gave a rueful little grin, "well, of me, I suppose. Kept walking to and fro, wouldn't be quiet. I tried to get him to leave, but he just kept talking to me, joking with me—trying to make himself feel better, I'd wager.

"And he asked me how I liked working here. And I said, well enough, but that it was hard work. Then he gave me an odd sort of smile, and clasped me on the shoulder, and said, 'That Aradîr's not giving you too much trouble, then, now is he?' And I said no, he was a good master for the Houses. And then Lord Tarnion just sort of laughed, and said how funny he thought it was that he had been made Master in the first place. I asked him why that was, and then he laughed again (I was afraid he would wake his son) and said that he had heard that Lord Aradîr was wont to dislike fellows like me."

"Fellows like you?" I asked.

Laeron nodded. "He looked to be in a bad way. And he kept calling me 'lad,' as well. 'You greycoats, lad,' he said, 'with those soft hands of yours. You did not hear this from me, lad, but he had some terrible trouble some years back.' And then he asked me if I had ever seen Lord Aradîr's wife, and I said that I didn't think I had. And he just said, 'Well, she's a pretty one, if ever there was.' And then he gave that odd sort of smile again, and he did this."

Laeron held up his left hand, and with his right thumb and forefinger he pressed one of the fingers on his left. It was the finger on which our men and women are accustomed to wearing their wedding rings.

"Well, that's odd," I murmured.

"Aye," Laeron nodded.

"How is his son faring?" I asked as we left the laundry.

"Oh… Well…he's gone, actually. He died earlier this afternoon." He shrugged, and scuffed at the floor with the toe of his shoe. "And a strong one, too. We all thought that he would make it."

* * *

In the corridor, Beren was talking to Elloth. He looked up and smiled when he saw us.

"There you are," he said.

"Here I am," I shrugged. "Beren, this is Laeron," I said, gesturing towards him. "He's a surgeon."

"Just an apprentice," Laeron said. He smiled at Beren and then glanced at Elloth, who looked at me with her eyebrows raised.

"But a very good one," I said. "And Beren is with the City infantry." The two young men shook hands. Laeron was all height and angles next to Beren, who stood firmly planted, one foot slightly forward.

"The surgeons here do excellent work," he said.

"Well, we—we certainly try, I suppose. Thank you." Laeron passed a hand through his hair again. We were both still slightly damp from the air of the laundry, and Beren's clothes were dark with water—he had probably just come in from the outside. "And the same may be said of the soldiers here."

"Yes. Lovely work," Elloth smiled.

"Thank you," Beren chuckled. "We try, as well."

"Well," Elloth intoned, as if she were singing the opening note of a song, "I should return to the dispensary, now." Her gaze went from Beren to me, and back again. "Perhaps you should come too, Laeron," she said with an indulgent little grin in my direction, which I pretended to ignore.

"Oh—well, ah—all right then," said Laeron, looking at each of us in turn. The calm young surgeon was fading away, and the nervous lad returning in his place.

"Quite," Elloth nodded approvingly. "Good even—it was very nice to speak with you, Beren."

"And with you."

"And what were you talking to Elloth about?" I asked Beren after they had left.

"I simply asked her if she had seen you."

"Oh?"

"She also remarked that you were a good healer, but a very poor player of cards."

Under my breath, I muttered something uncharitable.

"What was that?"

"Nothing," I said. Then I smiled. "But she thinks you do _lovely_ work." I made two broad, violent slashes with an invisible sword. "Just…_lovely_." I stabbed for emphasis.

"Well," he mused, one hand on his chin. "She _is_ very pretty." He dropped the last word to a half-whisper and leaned towards me.

I had no reply to make to that, save to put my right elbow into his ribs.

"Hi!" he laughed. "None of that, now." He shifted his weight away from me, and when he caught his balance once more he had slipped an arm about my waist. "I've already been wounded once in this war."

He was warm against me, and I did not meet his eyes. We were alone in the hallway.

"And might you be, again?" I asked after several moments.

"Perhaps." He drew a slow breath. "That's not for me to say."

"Then what say the others?"

He was silent, and then I heard him clear his throat. "That Gondor is not yet safe."

"What would you do to make it so, then?" I was not sure if I should lean in closer to him, or if I should pluck his hand away altogether. "Would you attack, or defend?"

"I would do whatever was commanded of me. Of my company."

"And if that choice was yours?" I shifted my weight but stayed as I was.

"It would not be. Ever."

"Does it bother you?"

"Does what bother me?"

"Never to have a choice."

I could feel him shrug.

"It was my choice to be a soldier. I knew I would have to follow orders. And what sort of a question is that? You do whatever your Warden asks of you, don't you?"

"The orders I follow would never kill me," I said, and regretted it immediately. I was always saying regrettable things to this young man, it seemed.

He was silent for a moment, and then he sighed. "Well, I don't know what to tell you, then." I looked up at him to find him staring at me. "I have to trust my captains."

I nodded.

He stepped back from me. "And yet…" he shook his head. "I feel as though there is something they aren't telling us. Something we're not privy to."

I snorted. "I feel the same way."

"Oh?" He raised his eyebrows. "About what?"

"About…things."

His response was simply to continue looking at me. One day, I thought for no reason in particular. One day I will be able to stare down this man, and he will be sorry indeed. I had seen him as he was that day in the south ward, dressed in his mail, blade at his side, blood running bright trails down his face. But as he was now, I could not imagine him in battle, could not imagine him moving to kill. But then, there was probably very much I could not imagine about him. Very much that I did not know.

"Well, that is the way of things, I suppose. We see naught but our own skirmishes." He paused, and his expression was pointed. "And what about that other fellow, then? What were you talking with _him_ about?"

"Oh? Laeron? I was aiding him at the surgery."

"Do you do that very often?"

"Sometimes. He's in love with Elloth, you know."

"Is he?"

"Yes." I grimaced—another regrettable thing. "But pretend I didn't say that. I'm supposed to be good at keeping secrets."

"So am I."

I looked at him, and then I reached for his hand. I wanted to hold something that was not dying or dead.

"What would you do, Beren, if…suppose your friend was wounded near to death."

"My friends _were_ wounded." He closed his fingers around mine and I thought of Tarondor. "They are." He paused. "I would stay with him, if I could. That's what I would want. If it were me."

"Aye." I swallowed. "That's well."

"That's what anyone would do, I should think." With his other hand he reached up and put two fingers beneath my chin. "Here, now—why all these questions? I never ask you anything."

"I worry." I smiled. "Ask me anything."

"Fine, then. Which circle are you from?"

"Fifth."

"And how long have you lived there?"

"All my life."

"And why are you a healer?"

"Because my mother is one. And my grandmother was a healer, too. And most likely her mother, as well."

"You have it in the blood, then."

I shrugged, shifting away from his fingers. "I have it in my line. I could never be sure about the _blood_."

"Well," he said, moving his thumb slowly against my palm, "I am from the Third Circle, and my father is also a soldier. And his brothers, and my brother. So I suppose that that is in my blood, as well. Or my line."

Suddenly I felt a dropping sort of feeling in my stomach.

"Beren, am I going to see you again?" I blurted.

He stared at me. "What do you mean?"

"What do you think I mean? We only chance upon each other's paths, now and again. Or maybe I find myself looking out for you, I—I don't know." I was pressing his hand more tightly. "And suppose that something does happen, and that you are sent away, and—"

"I'll come and find you."

"And there are a great many—well, many of the people I meet, I never see again. I have grown accustomed to that. And I've not known you for very long at all. But we're friends, I suppose, and—" I was thinking that I liked the way he stood and the way he listened. I even thought that I liked that odd barking sort of way that he laughed at times.

"I'll find you," he said.

"Will you?"

"I promise." He reached up with his free hand once more, and touched the backs of his fingers to my face. "I'm glad it was you, you know."

"What?"

"When, ah—with Tar'. I'm glad it was you."

"Oh."

At the noise of footsteps, we dropped one another's hands. He took a step back from me, just as a black-clad aide walked by. The man glanced at us as he passed.

The next time that Beren looked at me, his face was blank.

"Promise," he repeated. And when he left me this time he did not say goodbye.

* * *

And for some reason I was missing my father. This was something that seldom happened, and when it did, I found myself picking at the pain, worrying it like you might worry an aching tooth, seeing how long it could last.

I had a few bits of happiness in the back of my mind, but I had to be careful with these, because they became ugly if I held them for too long or turned them the wrong way. I had memories, from when I was very small, of being lifted into the air and tossed until I shrieked with laughter. I had loved him then because he threw me higher and held me more tightly than anyone else did. And I was his lovely girl and his splendid girl, or at least that was what he whispered in my ear when he had caught me in my descent.

And always that sharp, sickly sweetness on his breath. Years later, when an inebriated young nobleman was brought to the wards (_You'll keep this quiet, please; his father is rather important_) I caught the same scent in his exhalation and was struck with the sudden and giddy recollection of flight.

* * *

I took my supper quickly, by myself, as had become my habit. I picked at my bread and cheese and realized that all of the days were running together in my mind. And now the rain was the only thing in the world—when had it not been raining? I thought of the way the dried blood came away from my hands in the water of the washbasin. Éowyn and the _perian_, the Fourth Anduin Company, the books in Lord Aradîr's offices. I thought especially of the way that the points of Beren's worn knuckles had felt as they brushed against my cheek. That was a good thing, I thought, because it seemed to be mine and I could hold on to it for myself. Not like all of the other things, which kept slipping away from me, rearranging themselves in my thoughts.

Laeron came into the kitchens and sat down across from me.

"He's not back."

"What?"

"Valacar," he said softly. "He's not returned. No one's seen him."

"No one?"

"Not that I've spoken to. He was supposed to be back."

I had my elbow on the table, and I rested my forehead against my hand and did not say anything.

"So what's happened, then?" I could hear him shift in his chair. "What is it that's so bad I can't know about it?"

"It's not so bad," I whispered. He was staring at me. I took a drink of water before going on. "A few days ago, Laeron, when you were abed with fever. I was…they had just put the rationing in place. And one of the men they brought in, he—well, he was good as gutted, Laeron, but he was breathing. Dying." I took another drink. "And…" I looked down at the table. "Valacar asked me to leave, and I think…" I looked back up at Laeron and made a small motion with my right hand.

Laeron laughed a little when I was finished.

"I don't think he would do that."

I was quiet, and his face changed.

"That's a _stupid_ thing to do," Laeron said. His voice had dropped nearly to a whisper, but it was the sharpest I had ever heard him speak.

"Well, it isn't Canon," I offered.

"It isn't Canon, and it's _stupid_." His fist connected with the tabletop on the final word. "Did you know he was going to?"

"Laeron, if you had seen—"

"Did you know?"

I was silent again.

"Well, did you say anything to him? Before, I mean?"

"No. Of course not." It had never occurred to me. I was only a girl.

"And so now you think he's—he's got trouble for it?"

"Perhaps. He was—they might have wanted him to be the next Warden."

"There's—" Laeron traced a nervous pattern on the table with one fingertip. "There's things that happen, I suppose. When you feel too much. Or not enough."

"When who feels too much?"

He shrugged. "Everyone. At least, that's always what my mother said." He made an end to the pattern. "_Stupid_," he repeated.

"Laeron, we…that sort of thing happens all the time, you know. But just with the poppy, and no one—"

"I _know_. I know, but that's different, it's different, when…" His voice sounded strained, and he trailed off. "I don't like it."

"Neither do I."

He stood up. "Well, I don't—" He looked around. "I've been put on the evening-shift, as well."

"I've not. I can go and have a check about the wards…then maybe the out-buildings."

"All right," he sighed. "Will you come back and talk to me, if you have the chance?"

I nodded.

"And Laeron?" I asked. "You'll keep this close, won't you?"

"Yes," he said, rubbing his hand over his eyes. "Yes. What else am I supposed to do, after all?"

* * *

Most days I could cut across the gardens, and also any number of those small courtyards of which the builders of our City seemed to be so fond, tucked like stone pockets between buildings and alleyways. But when it was raining I stayed beneath the eaves and overhangs that lined the outside walls; there were few things more miserable than going around in wet shoes.

I made my way around the wards, and a knot of dread began to grow in my throat and my stomach once more. I was not accustomed to being alone in this way. There had always been someone to fall back to: the Warden, or my mother, or Fíriel. Now I seemed to have only myself to rely on—except for perhaps Laeron, but he knew no more than I did. Less than I did.

I remembered his fist on the table—_stupid_.

_And what did you think he would say?_ I asked myself. Perhaps it should have been a relief, but it felt simply like one more thread to add to the tangle of things.

I left the wards and the main part of the Houses. I had no plans of what I should do, _if_ I should do anything at all; but sometimes everything felt clearer to me when I was on my feet. The out-buildings, some offices and small houses and apartments, were clustered a short distance away from the eastern edges of the Houses. Night had fallen, and the City gleamed inexact and grey around me. The sound of the rain pounded in my ears, a dull constant roar.

I turned a corner, and suddenly I found myself very angry with Valacar. Why did he do the things that he did, I wondered, tell me the things that he told me? Couldn't he have told me to run along, there's a good girl, like any other surgeon would have? He should have left me stupid and unknowing and happy—or as happy as I could have been, at the time. I had things enough to trouble me.

More than enough—always more.

And—

"Oh," I said. I had glanced over my shoulder, and someone was there.

Oh, what? he asked, and I stepped back. Stumbled back, felt a wall behind me. Too many walls in this city.

He was there in front of me, and I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else, and quickly. In my mind I added and subtracted distances. It was a narrow side-street, nearly an alleyway. I could not remember which of his feet had taken the wound—it could have nearly healed by now.

You'll let me pass, please, I said.

I moved to the side, tried to get forward, looking for an opening or a slow point. I moved and he caught me by the arm, and this time he did not let go. My surprise turned to panic, and I could hear myself cry out in alarm against the rain and the hardness of his grip.

You'll be quiet, he said, and then the back of my head struck hard against the wall. Things seemed to bleed away from my mind for half of a moment, and when my sense returned there was only him. He was crushing against me and I could not breathe. Something sharp and cold at my throat. My mind was screaming inside of itself. _Why didn't you look out?_ _He was there_. _How long was he there?_

You'll be quiet, he repeated. I could not breathe. There was no room for me. He was going to break my bones, snap my ribs into halves and pieces.

You shouldn't be by yourself tonight, he said. Why are you alone, then?

I blinked.

Wordless at last. Doesn't know everything, does she? You don't know anything, little one. Don't think you're better than I am.

Don't— I choked. His breath was slow and heavy, and I heard it and I could feel it against me.

You weren't there. You don't know what it is when they come pouring all about you, and everywhere is death. Too many, you see—everything is eating, with them. Eat you alive, if they could. They're all teeth. They're all blood and noise.

I made a sound in my throat. I was limp, I was sick with fear.

You see, he said, they came and they were everywhere and there was nothing else. We were the front lines. We were in front. We were put there. And so first it was for the captains—they were the ones who could kill us. We were marks on a map.

He pushed the carving knife a bit harder against the skin of my neck.

And then they came, and there was nothing else, there was nothing. And now it is for you—it is for you people to kill us, if you like. Kill us as if we were nothing, too.

_Eastern river company_, the captain had told me. And then I understood: the little wooden men had had no balance to them because they were never meant to stand in the first place. Because they were corpses.

Not for you to say, he said. Not for you to do. Not for you.

He pressed me harder against the wall. He had taken the knife from my neck.

I could kill you right now, he said.

I closed my eyes. I could feel the metal slither lightly over my cheek, against my eyelids, barely touching. My face was wet. He had his hand in the folds of my skirts, and I heard myself make a sobbing noise.

Throw you on the fire. How would you like that, little one? Don't think that you know everything.

The inside of my chest was burning and I could not breathe.

I may not, though. I don't have to be like that.

His hand was in the folds of my skirts, and he moved again and I opened my eyes and closed them and everything was black and red. I tasted blood in my mouth. I could not breathe and at some moment he was so close against me that my spine was grating against stone. I fought him, then fought harder, but he was too heavy against me and then he had a hand against my neck and I could not breathe, and all the cries burned and died in my throat and _anywhere else_, I thought—_anywhere else but_—and he was killing me and I could not breathe—

When he was finished with me he moved back. Then he was standing over me, fixing his clothes. I was sobbing for air. He touched me with the toe of his boot. I could hear him breathing hard.

Well, don't cry, he whispered. That wasn't so bad.

I put my head against my knees and closed my eyes and waited. I was crumpled up in pain and too frightened to move. I did not know how long I stayed that way, but when I looked up again I was alone by the wall in the dark. The air was cool from the water. I leaned forward and retched, and my ribs were aching. The flagstones were damp and rough against the heels of my hands. Some part of my face was dripping blood.

I drank the air and I could not move for a very long time. When I got up, I thought I could still hear the rain falling.


	11. Histories

When my mother was young and unmarried, and the women at the market heard that she worked in the Houses, they would raise their eyebrows beneath their cloth caps and grin at her, asking if she had yet met her sweetheart there. As if the wards were the choice place for courtship, the place where suitor after ailing suitor lined up to meet you and gaze up at you with grateful, lovelorn eyes. My mother would just smile shyly at the market-women as they wrapped up her purchases and counted her coins, for she was always too polite and in too much of a hurry to disabuse them of their notions.

(Had it been me, I might have told them that it was work, just like any other sort of work. I would have told them that, yes, there were men, but most of them were there for a reason. My hand holding a dying man's hand was as good as any other woman's. By the end of the War, I had been called by the names of so many wives and sweethearts and daughters that my own seemed to matter very little.)

All the same, there was some truth to it: many of the girls who worked in the Houses met the men they would marry there (as many still do). My mother, however, was not like many of the other girls, and even if the Houses had had in their air some surefire elixir for inevitable, wounded love floating amongst the scents of blood and lye soap, she would have found some way to hold her breath and sneak around the back.

Which is essentially what she did.

I can imagine her, twenty-six and pretty, before the long years of her marriage and the long years leading up to the war had stiffened the lines of her back and shoulders and put crease marks about her eyes and mouth. When she was a girl, she and her best friend had made a practice of wandering the fifth and sixth circles in their spare moments, finding the narrowest alleyways and the most secluded courtyards (those unexpected pockets of stone), marking in their memories the swiftest routes and also the strangest and most unnecessary ones, the dead-ends and the spiraling paths. I can almost see her, twenty-six and pretty—when her best friend is already wed to that slender, watery-eyed young butcher from the fourth circle, already at home with one baby and another on the way. So that my mother finds herself, more often than not, walking alone.

It is midday and her morning-shift is finished and she is indulging in one of their old shortcuts. She is wearing her blue healer's dress, but she has taken the knotted cloth from her head and her hair is the color of rich garden earth, dark and arresting next to the stones of the corridor (her sole vanity; she always uncovers her head the moment she leaves the Houses). She weaves her way between the side-streets—too many of the windows that line the walkways boarded like heavy-lidded eyes—footsteps echoing as she ducks beneath a line of colorless laundry. My mother loves the emptiness, though, even if she does not love what it means. She loves how quickly she can weave through it, as if she can outpace the crumbling walls and the shadowed faces she sees every day in the Houses and the market. Her shortcut is almost ended, and she takes one last step through the broad archway that leads out to the main street.

One last step, and she has not looked ahead well enough, and she collides with another body—a barrier at the end of the shortcut, a wall where there should be no wall. She catches her breath and steps back and then she sees the other object in the collision. A tall man who has said something like _Oh!_ Driven sideways and backwards by the force of my mother's confidence, the assuredness of her steps. Leaning slightly back, large hands hanging his sides, two or three cloth bags lying heavily, dropped on the flagstones beside his feet. He is staring at her now, and he is maybe eight or ten years her elder, or else he is simply that much more tired today. She catches her breath, opens her mouth for an apology, begins to stoop to retrieve the bags.

But then she stops, because he is laughing. His eyes are wide and bright, and he is laughing loudly, and there is a strange edge of relief to it too, of expectations gratified, as if this is some joke that he has suddenly, finally understood.

She is twenty-six and pretty, and she arrests herself in her stooping and looks at him, and then she begins to laugh as well. The man is my father, and my mother is happy not only because she is laughing in the broad archway, but also because she has no idea what will happen later.

My mother told me the story about the shortcut and the laundry and the laughing. Later I imagined some of it, as well, patching the cracks in the masonry, indulging in my own side-routes and embellishments. But I know that there will always be something I am missing, something that I have not taken into account. Things I could never have dreamt of. So I try not to imagine too much. Really, I can only tell you the things that actually happened.

* * *

It was raining and I stood up with one hand braced against the wall. It hurt to stand and it hurt to move. I was filthy. My fingers were chafing on the stones of the wall because they were shaking. I could not leave and I could not stay there, so all I could do was stand, trembling. It was raining and it was dark. I should not have been out alone.

I was breathing the damp air, over and over, gasps that only went halfway through my chest, and that hurt, too, to breathe like that, but I could not make myself stop. My heart was beating quickly, and the rest of me could not keep pace with it. I did not belong to myself any longer. I only wanted to be where he would not be.

I kept my fingers on the wall and moved down the alleyway. It hurt to walk. I felt ill and I wanted to stop and double myself over, and perhaps I did, once or twice. I would go a few steps, stop and look around me, listening hard through the rain, imagining I heard noises that were not there. I thought for a moment of going down to the fifth circle where our house stood vacant and dark, finding some way to crawl inside and stay there. But then I thought of crouching behind the boarded windows, all of our things in the same places they had been since the final day of the evacuations, stowed and locked away, and it only made me shake harder. I could still smell him on me—he had smelled of metal.

It was a long way to go and I was not sure of it. He had wrenched my bones out of joint, I thought, and I thought that I could still hear him breathing at the back of my neck. One turn moved into another and then I was at the of the east wing of the Houses, at the edge of one of the very small gardens. Few patients ever came here. I had seldom come here, either, but the entryway was open and I stepped inside and I thought I could make my way from there, slip through and find an empty place to sit until I could think again.

* * *

No one who comes to the Houses seeking aid is ever turned away. Still, we rarely see those from the lower circles, unless they are near to death. Carpenters or stonemasons badly injured at work, the very occasional drunkard whom someone has had the care and the time to pull from the gutter.

"They have their own healers on the lower circles," Fíriel once told me. "Women who work in their own houses, or go to visit the ill in their own beds at home."

"And who teaches them?" I had asked her. I was eleven or twelve years old, and Fíriel then was a few years younger than my mother had been when she had walked too quickly through a crumbling archway and into her future.

"Their mothers, most of the time," Fíriel said.

"Only their mothers?"

"Yes, I suppose. Perhaps their friends, sometimes. Why not? Your mother teaches you."

"Yes, but not only her. So do you, and Ioreth, and the other ladies, and the Warden. And have they got a Canon that they have to recite, as well? How do they know what they are supposed to do?"

Fíriel smiled a little. She was pretty and very grown-up, and I loved being with her because she seemed to know everything, even the things you might not suppose she would. "Well, not all places are like here. Which is probably just as well."

She was the one to whom they gave the rare girls who came to us from the lower circles. There seemed to be some unspoken rule about it. Thin, ill-treated tavern girls with bruises on their faces and furtive looks in their eyes; they came in quietly, with their heads down.

"Don't stare," one of the matrons told me when I was very young. "Besides, those are not good women."

Later I asked Fíriel if this was true. She looked at me for a moment before she answered.

"No, not bad women," she sighed, a measure of distance in her eyes. "Working girls."

* * *

There was a low bench under the eave and I sat down. I was shaking harder. In the Houses during the long days of the Siege we had always had to keep moving through everything. The murk pressed in from the outside, the rumbling of the battles came from below, and we did our best to work the dread into the ground. This was a different sort of fear. There was nothing for me to hold to.

I heard a noise that was not the water dripping down, and I felt myself stiffen. Someone was walking past; I found myself on my feet again. It was a man, and he stopped and came near, and—

"_Valar_, there you are. What are you doing here?"

Valacar.

* * *

"Are you all right?" he was asking me. It was too dark to see his face very well.

"I—" All I could do was shake my head. I sat down again. At least I could breathe a bit more deeply, now.

"You're _bleeding_." He reached over to touch my shoulder, and I flinched away. "What happened to you?" When I said nothing, he went on. "How long have you been here?" He was taking off his coat. He leaned towards me and I started. "Here—it's all right." He put it over my shoulders, and it was heavy. "You should come inside."

"Where were you?" I finally managed to whisper.

"Here, take this." He was holding out a handkerchief and I took it and wiped my face. My hands were still shaking. "You're staying here in the Houses, aren't you? North wing, is it?" I nodded. I thought of the wards. I thought of the talk in the wards and how crowded they were. "I'll take you back there, then. See that you're looked after, all right?" I thought of the wards, and of all the men, and I could feel myself shaking harder still. It was the sort of sensation I sometimes got when I ran up the stairs too quickly and missed a step—where you had needed there to be a landing, there was only the shock of empty space and lost balance. I put my face in my hands and began to cry.

"Here now, what is it? It's all right. Don't you want—" I shook my head. I was not sobbing loudly, only choking on it all at the back of my throat. I thought I could hear him sigh. "All right. It's all right. Come inside, at least."

* * *

His handkerchief was still crumpled in my right hand as he stood outside the door in the dim corridor, out of the rain. ("You can come in for a while, at least," he had said. We were still in the east wing.) He patted at his side, and then looked at me and said, "Coat pocket." As I took his jacket from my shoulders and gave it back to him, he smiled at me for a moment, the way a person might smile when he is hoping for unlikely good news. I only dropped my gaze downward, and when I looked back up at him he was taking out a key and working it into the lock.

Inside, I stood by the wall while he started a fire in the grate. He was in his shirtsleeves, kneeling with the yellow light reflecting on his face, and he looked like someone I scarcely knew. The corners of the room began to emerge from the darkness as the fire began to blaze.

This was wrong, I thought. I should not be here. I would have given anything for a proper bath at that moment, or, even better, to find some way to crawl entirely out of myself.

"Come and sit," he said, and he watched me as I hesitated, and then as I walked over and sank down gingerly before the fire, the heat prickling against my skin. I began to tuck my dress in around me but my fingers dropped away when they found tears in the cloth. I half wished that he would not look at me at all. I knew that in all likelihood I was bleeding underneath my skirts, though I was trying not to think about it. He stood up, walked a few paces off, and sat back down with a towel and a water basin. "Here, look," he began. "Loosen your collar." I had a straight cut just below my left collarbone which I could not remember receiving.

He was hesitant and solicitous and he kept his distance. Was I warmer, now? Did I want something to drink? To eat? I could only shake my head. He brought me a blanket.

"Who did that?" he finally asked, gesturing towards the damp towel I was pressing against my skin. I stared at the floor. I did not want to give him an answer that would only lead to other questions. He cleared his throat.

"I spoke to Laeron," he said.

"You did?" I looked up at him again. He nodded.

"After the evening-shift."

"Evening-shift's over?"

He nodded again, slowly. "It's been over for a long time," he said softly. "He was worried for you."

"And for you," I said. I was trying to keep my voice low and even, but it seemed to have taken on a will of its own. I swallowed. "Did he…"

Valacar smiled again, that brief, uncertain expression. "He wasn't pleased with me, I think."

"I'm sorry."

He shook his head. "Don't be. You did nothing wrong." He stared into the fire, then looked back towards me. "Laeron said…you had gone to ask after me?"

When I nodded, he rubbed a hand over his face, and he looked very tired. "I'm sorry," he said. "You shouldn't have—" he began, but then he stopped and was quiet.

"How is that? Better?" he asked after a few moments.

I took the towel away from my collarbone. "Fine."

He leaned closer to me, and I shrank back. "It needs a few stitches," he said.

"It's not that deep," I said. He got up again and went to where his jacket was hanging by the door. He seemed to be going into the pockets once more.

"You'll have a scar."

"I don't care."

"You might care, later." He lit a candle on a small side-table. "You know it won't take long."

"Why won't you tell me what's happening?" I asked.

He had a needle between his fingers but he stopped and looked at me for a long moment. Then he sighed.

"I've been dismissed," he said, pushing the needle through the center of the candle's flame. "I think you should probably lie down for this, don't you?"

"_What_?"

"I've been dismissed from the Houses until I receive further notice." He was threading the needle.

"They can't dismiss you. We're still at war." I pulled the blanket more tightly about myself. Everything was less than real. All I wanted was a bath. I wanted to feel clean and safe and I wanted the pain to go away. I was trying not to think much further ahead than that.

"It would seem that they can. They can, and they have. I don't want you to worry about any of this. Now, please just come here and—"

"You keep saying that, Valacar. You've kept saying that, but you know I'll worry, anyway, don't you? If you didn't want me to ever worry, maybe you shouldn't have done anything in the first place!"

"You're shouting," he said quietly, the way he had said it to me on the day that Laeron had been laid low with a fever, and Valacar had called me in to help. The needle and thread were still in his hands, and he crossed the room and crouched down beside me. I moved away, felt a fresh pang of soreness at my side. "You're shouting. I'm sorry," he said. "And I'm sorry that I don't know what to say to you." I looked away. "Now, I am going to try to help you. But I can't unless you let me."

I had gotten closer to the fire. My face was too warm by now, and I stared at him. He had been dismissed in the end, after all, I thought. Then I nodded.

"All right. Now come and lie down."

* * *

"Always remind them not to touch their stitches," my mother had told me. I was still learning then, and it had been odd, trying to make myself put a needle and thread through someone's skin as if it were a piece of cloth. "They will always want to touch them, but they'll only make them dirty."

And now I was passing my fingers over the small seam of thread just below my collarbone, making it sting a little bit more. And why not? I wondered. Valacar probably made the smallest stitches of anyone in Minas Tirith, tailors and seamstresses included, but he was not here to tell me not to touch them. ("Get washed up, if you like," he had said, pointing me into the adjoining washroom after he had tied off the thread. Embarrassed, as if my reticence had become contagious. The same tone of voice he had used a few days ago when he had asked me if I thought he'd been right.)

I stared at the closed door for a few minutes before taking off my dress, thinking of what I would do if a girl came to me in such a state, came to the Houses like this. My back ached where he had pushed me into the wall, my ribs ached where he had shoved against me. He might have raked his hand through my hair, once. It was only after my fingers were wrinkled from the water in the basin that I realized that I could try to get him off of me for the next three hours and still not feel I had succeeded.

* * *

"He never lifted a hand to me," my mother sometimes murmured after my father had died, speaking to me or to one of her friends at the Houses. "He never lifted a hand to anyone." As if this were almost enough to make him a good man. The other women would cover my mother's hand with theirs and nod, silent and large-eyed, but I would simply look away. I did not like to see my mother regress to this timid, apologetic creature that she was not, save for the times when she spoke about my father.

Of course he never lifted a hand to us. That would have taken some enterprise, at least. It would have taken a bit of effort, especially in those last days. How could such a heavy, sodden mass of a man, propped stupidly in the corners of rooms, ever lift a hand to do anything?

My mother had gone back to the Houses to work when I was still very small. She had had little other choice. She had worked, and I had sat and played in the kitchens ("Look how small she is," Cook had clucked at me. "Have another sweet roll.") or in the gardens. Beren had been right, in the end; I had loved the gardens. At times I had loved them better than my own house.

So of course I would be a healer. I stayed there in the gardens and in the Houses as I got older, after I was old enough to be of real help. And I stayed there after we learned that Mordor would come, and after most of the others had left. After my mother had left. Of course I had stayed.

* * *

"Have a drink?" Valacar asked me. He was at the side table again, pouring something dark into a glass. He looked at me and I shook my head and found myself disliking him.

I was sitting on his bed, on top of the coverlet, tucking the extra cloth of a robe about me ("That's clean, if you like," he had said, handing it to me). Now that my cut was neatly stitched he seemed to no longer know what to do; any surgeon in the Houses would have long ago handed his patient off into the care of someone else, getting ready to receive his next case. I would not let him check me for broken bones and cracked ribs. "It's fine," I had murmured, and he had quickly dropped the issue. Only by knotting my fingers into the folds of the coverlet had I been able to keep myself still as his hands had hovered over my shoulder. Under the robe there were still wet spots on my shift, where I had scrubbed hard at the blood and anything else there that I did not care to contemplate in the least. I was hugging my knees to my chest like a small child, trying to see if curling myself around the pain might help lessen it.

Valacar poured a second glass, anyway, and set it on top of the night-table beside the bed.

"In case you change your mind," he said. "It might help you to sleep, if naught else."

"Do you want your bed back?" I asked him. He looked very tired.

"No." Still holding his own glass, he settled down into a chair near the bed. "I'll just sit here, if you don't mind." He took a sip of whatever sort of drink it was.

"I don't." Before, I had not studied the room in detail, but now I looked around. Even in the flickering firelight, I could tell that it was small and neat, although things were not as straight and square as he kept them at his surgery (which was not his surgery anymore, I reminded myself). A larger table against one wall, and some chairs. There was a book and an inkwell and writing implements, plain quills and knives, on the table. On the opposite wall was a small shelf with more than a few books, and I wondered at this, for I knew that surgeons' salaries were comfortable, but far from princely. There were windows above the bed, and the curtains were drawn.

He must have seen me looking, for he simply said, "Bachelor quarters," and took another sip. I wondered if he was always such a slow drinker. Not everyone liked to space it out like that.

"Have you lived here long?"

"Aye…ten years, perhaps. And I've not had company in a while," he added. I shifted on the bed, which made me grimace. In spite of everything I found myself reaching for the glass on the night-table. The drink had a strong flavor, not unpleasant, and I could feel it immediately, warm and heavy at the bottom of my stomach. I did not drink very often at all, but I had always thought that perhaps the warmth was part of the reason some people seemed so taken with the activity.

"Lossarnach brandy," he said. "It's not bad."

I nodded. He was watching me.

"Are you going to tell me what happened to you?" he asked softly, after a minute or two.

I could hear the soldier's voice, feel the blade at my neck, his weight against me. _Eat you alive, if they could_. I was ruined, I thought. That was what they called it. I was wrecked.

"Because if someone has hurt you, there should be consequences for him." He shook his head. "I don't want to see you hurt like this."

I clutched my glass more tightly. "Then don't look at me."

"I think you might feel better if I fetched one of the other women to look after you." His voice was kind, but all the same I hated the way he said it. All these men. They all thought they knew something. I did not want to be very near to him, but I did not want to be alone, either.

"I can look after myself."

"I know you can," he said, setting his glass down on the table and clasping his hands in his lap. "But you shouldn't have to."

I took a deep breath and I put my head against my knees.

"I don't want people to talk."

"And what will they talk about, sweetheart?" he asked very softly, and something in the softness made my stomach turn.

"Why won't you _stop_? It's no business of yours! You can't—" I could feel panic rise in my throat once more, the meager benefit of the fire and sitting and the resting all suddenly lost. I knew I was shouting but this time he did not tell me so. My back to the wall, and the cries of the Black Captain clawing at the inside of my mind, the glower of shadow in the East, and the rain—

"I just want to _die_," I said, and I lifted my head and stared at him. My voice was breaking. "I'm sure you could be of aid with _that_, Valacar," I added.

He did not say anything to that, just stared at me, then leaned forward so that his forearms were resting on top of the bed. I shrank back quickly.

"_Valar_," he murmured. I had made myself small in the opposite corner of the bed. The shaking was beginning to return. "You know I wouldn't hurt you."

"You could if you _wanted _to. That's the point, isn't it?"

"But I don't. I would never."

"You _could_." I was blinking back tears and loathing myself for it.

I could hear him sigh. His elbows were still resting on the bed and he had his face in his hands. "_Valar_," he repeated. "I'm sorry. I just don't think I can—" He broke off and shook his head and did not say anything else.

I was wiping stupidly at my eyes with the cloth of my sleeve.

"I must be in a terrible state," I said.

"I've seen you looking better," he conceded.

"No," I said, wiping at my eyes again. "I must be _awful_. Because you called me 'sweetheart.'"

I could feel him taking his weight off of the mattress, and then his hand was only over his mouth. He made a noise as if clearing his throat.

"Well. I promise I'll not do it again, then."

* * *

Somehow I managed to fall asleep, and then I woke up breathing hard. Cool sweat dotted my forehead. There it was again, that missed-step feeling. For a moment I forgot where I was, and the panic stretched for a moment into my waking, but then I remembered, which was not much of a relief, either.

"Nightmare?" Valacar was sitting in a chair on the opposite side of the room, near the bookshelf. A single candle was burning on the table.

I nodded. I was sitting up and I had both arms folded in towards myself.

For a while, neither of us spoke, and I stared down into the dark folds of the blanket that was lying across my lap. I looked up at him again. He was still watching me, his head inclined slightly to one side. He had a book in his lap.

"You're reading?" I asked. He nodded. "What are you reading?" My voice sounded rough. I had been dreaming about eyes and teeth. I did not want to go back to sleep.

He shrugged. "Just looking at an old book."

"Can I see?"

He nodded and got up and went over to where I was, taking the book in one hand and the candle in the other. I was relieved that he did not seem puzzled or hesitant; perhaps it never even occurred to him to question the fact that anyone else might want to see what he was reading.

"Do you like to read?" he asked as he sat down beside me, setting the candle on top of the night table. He moved slowly and cautiously, either because of weariness or because of me.

"No. I mean, I can't, very well," I admitted.

"You could always learn." He was sitting beside me with a book and everything was wrong, and I could not make it feel right. "This is a very old book," he was saying, slowly turning the pages. The candlelight was flickering and the words passed in and out of the shadow. "My uncle gave it to me when I was a boy, and his grandmother gave it to him. I don't know who gave it to her."

"What's it about, then?" It was a small book, but thick, and the covers looked as if they were dark blue, though I could not be certain. The paper smelled of dust and age.

"Just a book of histories," he said, slowly turning the pages. "The writer was very much part of the older tradition—a bit scattershot, and perhaps he relied a bit too much on anecdotes, but lively. Good reading for young boys, I suppose." I nodded, and he smiled a little. "Of course, my favorite part was always the one about King Valacar. They say that it was he who started the Kin-Strife, depending upon how far back one's reckoning goes."

I pulled the covers a bit closer around myself. "What did he do?"

"Well, he…I suppose he married the wrong woman." He put the book into my hands, as if giving me permission to judge for myself. It was heavy, and I studied the pages open before me, as if the spindly black letters could resolve themselves into a pattern for me. I wondered what Beren must be doing right now. And I almost wondered what _he_ was doing.

Besides the original lettering and illuminations, there were also passages here and there with lines running beneath them, notes scattered in the margins beside the old black letters like ill-fed stragglers trying to keep pace with an army on the march. "Did you make these marks?" I asked.

He looked to where my fingertip hovered above the page, and shook his head. "Those were already there when I received the book. I like them, though."

"Why?" I carefully turned the volume in my hands. "It seems wrong to mark in books."

"I used to like to think about it, sometimes. The writer is dead, and most likely whoever made these markings is dead, as well. But the words are still here. That's what I've always liked about books, I suppose. Knowing that they outlive us."

I was quiet for a long moment, and I ran my fingers over the page. I did not know how long it would be until the sunrise, but I knew that the sharp spine of the mountainside would be casting its shadow over the western half of the City, and that the greater Shadow would glower, distinct, in the East once more. I knew that I would have to make myself go back to the wards to help the men and talk to them, even though I wanted to stay quiet and folded in on myself.

"A lot of things outlive us," I said.

"True enough," he replied.

"Perhaps it's good," I said, "to think about such things. Because it means that nothing we do can ever matter. Not really. Or it matters very little. I mean, not being kings or stewards or anything."

"Is that what you think?"

"I don't know." I closed the book with the slow care which I believed was warranted by any such object. "Have you heard anything more about this King of ours?"

He shook his head. "Most likely no more than you have. I have heard that his lineage seems to be true."

"My brother always used to ask if he could climb up the wall of our house and into the next circle. And my mother would always say, 'Of course, dear. When the King returns.'"

"She'll have to think of something different to say, won't she?"

I nodded, and then I looked away. "I miss them. I miss my mother. I wish I had been with her more before she had to leave. Everyone was so busy—there was no time. I suppose that was good, in a way. There was no time to think about it. I wanted to believe that I would see her again."

"You will," he said.

I shook my head. "I don't know anymore. I don't know about anything."

"You will," he repeated.

"I wish she were here."

"I know."

I was still aching all over; it was almost worse than before, as if lying there had driven the pain further into my bones. I opened the book again, almost expecting it to creak in my hands like the hinges of an old door, and slowly turned the pages. I wondered idly if there was any namesake of mine tucked somewhere among the black words. Then I thought of something else.

"Who dismissed you, Valacar?"

He was quiet. He did not pretend that he had not heard me, or make a remark about the book, or fuss with the candle wax that was dripping upon the night-table, as I might have done had I wished to evade the question. At any other time, I would probably not have pressed him any further, but I was wounded and miserable, and at the moment I also felt oddly reckless and entitled.

"Lord Aradîr's not fond of you, then, is he?"

He smiled; a brief concession. "No, not terribly fond."

"And all because of that man? And because you might be the next Warden?"

"Might have been," he corrected me. He got up from his chair, and then he retrieved his empty glass and was filling it again.

"Why do you do that?" I asked.

"Do what?"

"That." I gestured towards the drink in his hand as he sat down again.

He shrugged, looking puzzled. "I like it, I suppose. Why?"

"I was just wondering."

"Did you want anything else?"

"No." Nothing that you could give me, at least, I thought.

"But you'll tell me if you do?"

"Yes. So is that why Aradîr doesn't like you? Only because of what you did?"

He sighed heavily and he took a drink. "I first met him many years ago," he said, as if that explained everything.

"So, were you friends with him, once?"

"Not really." I remembered what Laeron had said to me outside the laundry; it had seemed a hundred years ago, and I had been a different girl.

"Someone said that…I heard that…one of the lords said that Aradîr disliked surgeons."

"Oh?" Valacar's voice was mild.

"And that he had a pretty wife."

He raised his eyebrows. "So that's what they say, now, is it?" he asked softly. I nodded. He took another drink. "Well, she is very pretty. And probably he does not love her as well as he should."

"What does that mean?" _A perfect gentleman, I suppose?_ Aradîr had asked me with only a trace of a smirk on his face.

"It doesn't have to mean anything."

"But it does, doesn't it?" I watched him, sitting there with his drink in his hand, and resentment seeped into me once more. He had no right to be evasive with me, not now. The wall of the alley was still hard against my back, the rain still in my ears—I had not escaped. I would never escape. And then I remembered—

"It's your fault, anyway," I murmured before I could think better of it.

"What is?"

I closed the book and turned my attention to the top of the coverlet, twisting it in my hands again and again.

"What's my fault?"

"All the men in his unit were killed. He was the last one. He said it was not for others to decide which of them lived and which of them died."

"Who said that?" Valacar was staring at me now, intent.

"I thought—" I swallowed and wiped my face on my sleeve, just as clumsily as before. "I thought he would kill me. I really did. It's not fair." I was finding it difficult to breathe again, as if my ribs were still being crushed. "I never decided anything." I thought that Valacar would ask another question, but he was silent. "I thought he would kill me," I repeated. "Maybe it was my fault. But he didn't… Hadn't any right…" I trailed off. My throat had closed up again. Even that, I thought, was more than I should say to him; more than I needed to say.

"Did you know his name?"

I shook my head. I had seen him about, now, and then, I said; that first time when I stood in the garden, clutching a knotted cloth full of slightly burnt sweet rolls.

"It was _you_," I said. "I thought he was angry with you, more than anyone else. Perhaps he is."

Valacar slowly rubbed one hand over his eyes, the way he only did when he was very, very tired. How many more to go? he had asked on one particularly bloody day in the surgery; a question of diagnostics, not of impatience, but he had touched his own face in that same way.

"Then why didn't you tell me?"

"I didn't think that…until…and then no one had seen you. Eastern River Company; one of the captains told me. He had a wounded leg. I have to go and do my shift tomorrow, but I don't know where he…"

He put his drink down and he had both hands clasped in his lap and he was staring at the floor. He said, "I suppose it would not make any difference to you whether or not I apologized?" _It doesn't have to mean anything_.

"I'm tired of keeping your secrets for you."

"And that was very poor of me."

When I said nothing, he went on: "I'll speak to the Warden for you; he can—"

"No," I said, louder than I needed to. "You'll not say anything. To anyone."

"He'll only make sure that—"

"I said _no_." My voice caught in my throat. "It doesn't matter, if anything else should happen to me."

"Why not?" He reached for my left hand, which was still twisting at the folds in the coverlet. I drew it away from him.

"Valar, why do _think_? Suppose you—if you… If it were _your_ daughter, who… You wouldn't want anyone to... It doesn't matter, anyway." My face was wet.

He had withdrawn his hand. "Does it matter to you?"

"Here's your book," I said, handing it back to him. He took it wordlessly and set it down on the night-table. "Just don't. Please. I can look after myself." Which was probably half a lie; I only wanted my mother.

In some ways it was clear that Valacar had always worked in the surgeries and never in the wards. There were times when he forgot to take all of the edge out of his voice, and perhaps he asked the wrong questions at the wrong times, and besides that he did not know the proper way to tuck in bed covers. But there are also those things that cannot truly be taught or practiced, but that everyone who works in the Houses seems to learn if you simply let them go about their duties for one or five or ten years. And one of these things is being able to recognize the moment at which you should turn around and simply allow your patient to roll over and cry until she finally falls asleep.


End file.
